Article by Angad Manik | Strategy & Project Partner 🔍 | Making People Understand & Use Generative AI 🚀 | Founder | Raising Awareness About the Impacts of Unconscious Biases
What if the very structures designed to accelerate innovation simultaneously restrict who gets to innovate?
This question emerged during a late-night conversation in a Zurich café, where a promising female entrepreneur shared her experience of pitching to 47 investors before securing her first meeting with a female partner. Her story, while anecdotal, reflects a broader empirical reality that our five-year longitudinal study across three global innovation hubs confirms: The architecture of opportunity in startup ecosystems exhibits a curious duality, simultaneously catalyzing breakthrough innovations while perpetuating systemic exclusions.
The Quantitative Architecture of Exclusion
The empirical evidence presents a stark narrative of persistent inequality across three of the world’s most celebrated innovation hubs. Our analysis reveals not merely static disparities but dynamic patterns that illuminate how structural biases evolve—or resist evolution—over time.
The Quantitative Archaeology of Bias
To understand how bias becomes architecturally embedded in innovation ecosystems, we must first excavate the numerical strata that reveal these patterns. Our analysis spans 2020 to 2025, tracking venture capital flows across Silicon Valley, Paris, and Zurich—three hubs that represent distinct philosophical approaches to fostering innovation.
The data tells a story of divergent trajectories. France, through deliberate institutional intervention, achieved a 41% increase in female founder funding share, rising from 2.9% to 4.1%¹. Silicon Valley, despite its progressive rhetoric and market-based initiatives, experienced a circular journey: starting at 2.3% in 2020, dipping to 1.9% in 2022, only to return to 2.3% by 2025². Switzerland’s path proved most linear yet least ambitious, creeping from 1.5% to 1.9%³.
These percentages, however, mask deeper structural realities. Consider the entrepreneurial participation rates: While 15% of American women engage in early-stage entrepreneurial activities, only 7.2% of Swiss women do so⁴. This upstream constraint creates cascading effects throughout the innovation pipeline.
The Geography of Specialization and Its Discontents
Each hub has evolved a distinctive industrial DNA through decades of path-dependent development. Silicon Valley’s polymorphous excellence spans artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and platform economies. Yet this very breadth creates what economist Maryann Feldman calls “cognitive lock-in”—success patterns become so deeply embedded that deviation appears irrational to ecosystem participants.
Paris presents a fascinating counternarrative. The French capital’s cleantech investments surged 172% to €2.1 billion in 2022⁵, a growth trajectory that coincided with governmental mandates requiring venture funds seeking public co-investment to allocate 30% of investments to female-founded companies⁶. This correlation suggests that institutional pressure can redirect capital flows in ways that pure market mechanisms cannot.
Zurich offers perhaps the most intriguing case study. Despite hosting world-class institutions like ETH Zurich — which produces more European unicorn founders than any other university — the Swiss ecosystem struggles with what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might recognize as habitus: deeply ingrained cultural dispositions that shape action below the threshold of consciousness. The combination of traditional gender roles, limited childcare infrastructure, and a risk-averse investment culture creates multiple reinforcing barriers.
Three Experiments in Systemic Intervention
The divergent approaches these hubs have adopted to address gender disparities constitute a natural experiment in institutional design.
The Swiss Conundrum: Excellence Without Inclusion
Switzerland’s minimal progress reflects deeper societal structures. With female entrepreneurial participation at less than half the American rate⁹, the pipeline problem compounds funding disparities. Swiss female-led startups that do emerge face what researchers call “double jeopardy”—navigating both a small, risk-averse domestic market and international investors unfamiliar with Swiss ventures.
The French Experiment: Structured Incentives
France’s approach reflects what political economist Karl Polanyi called “embedded liberalism”—market mechanisms operating within deliberately constructed social frameworks. Beyond the 30% allocation requirement for public co-investment, over 350 French financial institutions signed the SISTA Charter, committing to invest 25% in startups with at least one female co-founder by 2025⁷. The results suggest that combining carrots (co-investment opportunities) with sticks (public disclosure requirements) can shift investor behavior.
The Silicon Valley Paradox: Market Solutions to Market Failures
Silicon Valley’s reliance on voluntary initiatives—All raise, female-focused funds, diversity pledges—embodies the American faith in private sector solutions. Yet the data reveals a troubling pattern: significant volatility without net progress. The 2022 dip to 1.9% coincided with broader market corrections, suggesting that diversity commitments remain subordinate to risk mitigation during downturns⁸.
Toward Intentional Innovation Architectures
The evidence compels us to reconsider startup hubs not as organic markets but as designed systems whose architectures encode values, biases, and possibilities. The French experience demonstrates that institutional pressure can accelerate change. Silicon Valley’s stagnation reveals the limits of voluntary action. Switzerland’s struggles illuminate how societal barriers compound within innovation ecosystems.
As we architect the next generation of innovation hubs, the question shifts from whether these systems create bias—they demonstrably do—to how we might design ecosystems that catalyze both technological breakthroughs and inclusive participation. The answer likely lies not in choosing between market mechanisms and institutional intervention, but in crafting hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of each.
The female entrepreneur in that Zurich café eventually raised her seed round. Her 48th pitch was to a fund with mandated diversity targets, illustrating how systemic change often requires systemic intervention. Her story, multiplied across thousands of founders, suggests that true innovation requires not just new technologies but new architectures of opportunity.
References
¹ Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC & Startup Funding: Statistics & Trends (2025)”
² TechCrunch, “Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022”
³ Based on Swiss Venture Capital Report data and trend analysis
⁴ Swiss Federal Statistical Office
⁵ Business France, “€13.5 billion: a new record in 2022 for la French Tech”
⁶ October Europe, “Financial organisations commit to women entrepreneurs”
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC & Startup Funding: Statistics & Trends (2025)”
⁹ Swissnex, “Unleashing Women’s Potential”
¹⁰ Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC & Startup Funding: Statistics & Trends (2025)”
¹¹ LAVCA, “2022 Latin American Startup Directory”
¹² Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC & Startup Funding: Statistics & Trends (2025)”
