Days after Ellen Pao’s resounding defeat in a high-profile sex-discrimination lawsuit that was the talk of Boston’s venture capital community, the inaugural Boston Women’s Venture Summit has taken on a new sense of urgency.
The summit’s proximity to Pao’s verdict is a coincidence — the event has been planned for months — but organizers and speakers said the conference, scheduled for April 7, is a near-instant outlet for discussion and a logical next step.
During five weeks of dramatic and occasionally sordid testimony, Pao’s legal battle against the venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers highlighted obstacles to female advancement in an industry in which 94 percent of the partners are men. A jury in San Francisco determined that Pao, a former junior partner at Kleiner Perkins, was not unfairly denied promotions on the basis of her sex.
The verdict angered some in Boston, while others said that regardless of the outcome, the case sparked a critical conversation about diversity.
Now comes a daylong series of speeches, coaching sessions, and business pitches by and for women. After a slow start to registrations, the conference is nearing its 150-person capacity.
“It really shone a megawatt lamp on the lack of diversity in all ways in Silicon Valley and, by proxy, Boston,” Sheryl Marshall, the conference’s founder, said of the case. “I don’t want to scold; I want to shine our own light on Boston.”
The venture summit, organized with help from the Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership at Babson College, is meant to educate and showcase women in business. Some men will be there, too, as judges, coaches and — Marshall hopes — potential investors. There is no prize for the eight women-led companies participating in the pitch contest, beyond a chance to be seen by venture capitalists in the audience.
Susan Duffy, executive director of the Babson center, said a central theme of the event will be the shared responsibility of men and women and investors and entrepreneurs to diversify high-tech fields. Babson research being presented at the conference found that just 3 percent of venture-backed startups have female chief executives, and only 14 percent have women in management.
“We’re not going to achieve what we want to achieve by taking on the venture capital industry and saying, ‘Here’s what’s wrong. Go and fix it,’ ” Duffy said.
“Investors have a role to play in opening their deal flow, being intentionally inclusive in the companies they consider. But anybody who wants to play the game needs to learn how it’s played now. Then you can push for a new game or an evolved game.”
Speaker Pam Randhawa, chief executive of the Newton biotechnology startup Empiriko, said she will lay out what she sees as common weaknesses among female entrepreneurs and urge women to be bolder.
“Women in general are not willing to take as many risks, and they’re not as good at networking,” said Randhawa, whose company is developing a new method of testing drug therapies that simulates the chemical environment of a human liver in the laboratory. “My message to women will be to take calculated risks.”
Jodi Goldstein, director of the Harvard Innovation Lab and a judge for the summit’s pitch contest, said she observes some of the same qualities among the entrepreneurs she advises every day. Specifically, she notices that women tend to make more conservative projections when pitching business ideas than their male counterparts do.
A preview of the feedback she’ll dish out next week: “Whatever you tell investors, they’re going to cut it in half anyway. So you might as well double it.”
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Callum Borchers can be reached at callum.borchers@globe.com. Follow him
on Twitter @callumborchers.