This post originally appeared at Forbes.com, written by Nancy E. Pfund,
As a woman in venture capital, I am part of a small club, and it’s part of my job to try to change that. As a woman in clean tech venture capital, the club is smaller still, but somehow it fits like a glove. While it pains me to say this, women in clean tech venture capital are as much the exception to the rule as renewable energy is to the U.S. energy supply.
For example, for all the hoopla that surrounds a wind farm or solar plant that gets built on public lands, many more permits are granted each year to oil and gas exploration without most people even knowing. In 2010, the Bureau of Land Management approved nine large-scale solar projects on 40,000 acres of federal land. In that same year, the BLM processed more than 5,200 applications for gas and oil leases covering 3.2 million acres.
