"When you're walking into a room … all the statistics are stacked against you."
"The difference in the Australian market in terms of risk appetite, comparative to the US, where people are happy to write you a check on a napkin, is [investors asking], 'we need to see revenue, and then we also need to see experience,'"Ms Box said.
"Many of us have actually built our careers off the back of a phenomenally successful mixed-gender team, and we need to be starting to tell more of those stories."
"We want to be making sure that there's no chance that we're accidentally missing out on the next Mel from Canva just because she presents in a slightly different way."
"It's really disheartening and disappointing,"Ms Yang said.
"By mandating investing in a certain number of companies that are founded by women, I think investors would argue and push back on that to say, 'well, we can't do that, because what we're doing is potentially not returning the best outcomes for our investors.'"