‘Show us the data’: Australia’s VC and startup ecosystem finally get serious about gender equity
After a decade of watching the same statistic quoted — and the same interventions fail to shift it — Noga Edelstein decided the problem wasn’t the women. It was that nobody could see the system producing the gender funding gap.
For years, the standard response to Australia’s gender funding gap was to fix the women. More accelerators. More pitch coaching. More programs. Noga Edelstein ran some of them. She sat on boards and helped individual founders raise capital. Yet the number didn’t move.
“What I started to realise,” she says, “was we were not shifting the matrix.”
Her realisation — that capacity building is treating a systems problem as a personal one — is what eventually brought Edelstein to Equity Clear, the non-profit that on Thursday night launched its most ambitious project yet: a national standard for tracking how funding opportunities move through investor pipelines, not just where they end up.
The initiative didn’t start with a report. It started with frustration.
In late-2022, Samar Mcheileh of Scale Investors, Lisa Fedorenko of Alberts, and Rachel Yang of Giant Leap founded Equity Clear out of what Mcheileh describes as “a deep frustration among the investor community” — a collective impatience with a conversation that kept circling the same data points without ever getting underneath them.
