Alison Berkley Just Joined The Male-Dominated Venture Capital World

As long as Sheryl Sandberg has sparked a discussion about the lack of women leaders in the workplace, let's look at the VC world.

It doesn't take long to see that it is very, very male.

And when it comes to VC firms that invest heavily in enterprise tech, it's even more of a boys club.

For instance, Greylock Partners, home of Workday's Aneel Bhusri and LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, lists no women among its investing team. Neither does Andreessen Horowitz. Ignition Partners lists one woman among its 13 partners, Michelle Jacobson Goldberg. Accel counts six women among its 65-ish partners.

And so on.

Emergence Capital had no woman partners either until today.

Alison Berkley just joined as an "operating partner." She won't be taking on a classic VC role. Her job focuses on helping the firm's startups with marketing and recruiting. Berkley was previously running Harvard Business School’s California Research Center. Prior to that, she was a key exec at Intuit who launched it's successful Quicken Loans business.

The VC world, like the tech startup world, clearly needs more women, and that goes double for enterprise. So congratulations to Berkley on her new job.