Women, in recent history, have always gotten the short-end of the stick. It has taken a long time for the biases in academia to be addressed at all, and even now we aren't quite there yet. Here are a few examples from history,
Lise Meitner was the second woman in the world to gain a doctorate in physics. When she started, women weren't allowed to go to college, one of humanity's greatest minds spent her youth as a teacher. It was the only career available to her. When she tried to start doing research, she was refused,
> The only difficulty was that Hahn told me in the course of our conversation that he had been given a place in the institute directed by Emil Fischer, and that Emil Fischer did not allow any women students into his lectures or into his institute. So Hahn had to ask Fischer whether he would agree to our starting work together. And after Hahn had spoken to Fischer, I went to him to hear his decision and he told me his reluctance to accept women students stemmed from an unfortunate experience he had had with a Russian student because he had always been worried lest her rather exotic hairstyle result in her hair catching alight on the Bunsen burner.
- https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
Fischer relented with pressure from Hahn, but in some cases, it took nearly half a decade for people to allow her to work with them. She lost years banging her head against the wall. What else could she have discovered had she gotten the right resources from the start?
She prevailed against these barriers, but she was never recognized as an equal. Recognition eluded her. Lise and Otto discovered fission together, Hahn got the Nobel, she didn't.
Decades afterwards, the first Pulsar was detected by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She helped build the array that made the discovery. She spent her nights looking at the data. She noticed the anomaly. She championed it when her supervisor dismissed it as a glitch. Her persistence paid off, and her supervisor got the Nobel.
Women have never been accepted as equal. Even in bastions of "non-conformist" thought such as universities. After all, how radical and non-conformist could these systems be if they repeated the same mistakes as the societies around them? They excluded people for being Jewish, for being born with the wrong sex organs, for having the wrong skin color, for being the wrong person. They were radical along some axes, but conformist along others.
VC/PE is much the same. The industry is radical along some axes but extremely conformist along others. And it's not an easy thing to "correct". Banging against this wall will crack your skull far before it shows even the slightest crack.
I don't know the answer here. Except that it wouldn't be the right stuff to give up.