©2015 Bloomberg News
NSJ9G0SYF01U

(Bloomberg) — Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will gather at the White House Tuesday as part of President Barack Obama’s bid to increase gender and racial diversity among funders and startups.

With 3 percent of startups backed by venture capital led by women and 1 percent by blacks, and women representing 4 percent of venture capital investors, the White House is hosting its first “Demo Day” to try to increase all of those figures.
“We live in a world of a lot of unconscious bias,” said Megan Smith, the U.S. chief technology officer, who previously was vice president of business development at Google Inc. “We have to help ourselves get past that. It’s of critical importance to the economy.”

Obama has staked part of his economic legacy on equal pay for women and greater workplace protections for them. A message of the entrepreneur day will be that increasing gender and racial diversity is also good for corporate bottom lines, said Tom Kalil, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy deputy director for technology and innovation.
“It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the profitable thing to do,” he said.

The White House event, modeled after private sector demo days, will be different than the popular “Shark Tank” TV show where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to investors, Smith said in an interview.

Institutional investors, including the California Public Employees Retirement System and the New York City pension funds, plan to announce as part of the White House event that they’ll spend more than $11 billion to increase manager diversity, according to the Obama administration.

Venture capital firms with a collective $100 billion under management will announce changes intended to increase staff diversity, the White House said. Those firms include Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.

To contact the reporter on this story: Angela Greiling Keane in Washington at agreilingkea@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Gordon at cgordon39@bloomberg.net Justin Blum, Don Frederick