As co-founder of the carsharing company Zipcar, Robin Chase was an entrepreneurial role model. With Chase as C.E.O., the company secured seed capital in 2000, allowing it to rapidly increase its number of cars in operation. Business magazines and women's groups heaped praise on her, and by the end of 2002, 170 Zipcars were zipping around Boston, New York, and Washington, while annual revenues had grown to $2.1 million.
 
But that same year, a big round of financing fell through and a new group of investors joined the board. In January 2003, the board ousted Chase as C.E.O. in a split vote that chagrined initial investors. Some suggest she was discriminated against because she was a woman.

“They decided she wasn’t ‘fundable’ enough,” says former Zipcar board member Paul Davis, a general partner at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Seed Partners, which supplied A-round funding to Zipcar. “But the company was performing to ambitious plans.”

According to Davis, Chase’s gender played a clear role in her ouster. “She wouldn’t have been as vulnerable if she had been a guy,” says Davis, who has spent eight years in the venture capital business. “Robin proved better at operations than anyone at any company I’d ever seen. It would have been really hard to take out a male C.E.O. who was putting out as aggressive numbers as she was, and meeting them.” (For its part, Zipcar denies sexism was a factor, saying the company simply needed a stronger manager who could raise additional funding and “take the company to the next level.”)

Chase herself demurs at the suggestion of sexism, instead choosing to focus on personality differences with the new board members. But the numbers speak for themselves when it comes to the degree to which raising venture capital remains a man’s game.

Of the 2,338 U.S. companies that raised venture funding in 2006, only 6.5 percent of them had a female founder and only 4.3 percent had female C.E.O.’s, according to research firm VentureOne, down from 8.5 percent and 8.0 percent in 2002, respectively. This is despite the fact that women comprise roughly half of all small business owners in the U.S., although, to be fair, far fewer of them actively apply for funding, according to  Amy Millman, president of Springboard Enterprises, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit which supports female business owners’ efforts to secure funding.  

Female entrepreneurs interviewed for this story say that getting venture funding can be more difficult for women, and that they were often judged by different standards once they had secured funding and were running their companies.

One female founder of a venture-funded software company on the East Coast says that after she willingly stepped aside as C.E.O. for a new chief with more management experience, she noticed something disturbing—there wasn’t much new about the new C.E.O. other than his gender and his macho turns of phrase.