Only 20% of Silicon Valley employees are women, and a report from a web specializing in risk investments indicated that in 2010 87% of start-up founders on its database were white. Under such conditions, finding an African American woman is a titanic endeavor, something that Digital Undivided (DU) can confirm.

This social enterprise working to promote the work of urban entrepreneurs spent some time seeking African American woman entrepreneurs that had been able to obtain $2 million in funding for their project. They only found three. It was this lack of diversity that lead to the launching of Project Diane, with the aim of putting an end to these patterns in the technological industry and that leave social groups such as this one aside. 

"Project Diane wants to document those African American women founders that are out there, promote them but, most importantly, discover why they are or aren’t successful”, Kathryn Finney, DU founder said to the technology website Fast Company. With all that information, Project Diane intends to reveal the formula of successful African American companies. Subsequently, all participants will be eligible to participate in Digital Undivided’s FOCUS program and receive assistance and contact opportunities from its startup accelerator.  

To date, of the 138 names of founding African American women collected, only 11 of them have obtained investments of over $100,000. For this reason, and because it is still necessary to gather much more information in order to draw conclusions, the data is truly disheartening: African American woman are only involved in 0.1% of risk investments.

Do you know of anyone with the profile? If so, encourage her to participate in Project Diane.