The idea was for a site that would collect data about the sorts of things applicants really want to know but don’t ask in job interviews: Do you feel as if co-workers value your opinions? Do people actually take their vacation days? How often do you work nights and weekends? It would offer online personality tests, then use psychometric data to match candidates with employers more effectively. It would make money from companies paying for information about candidates and to post job ads, as they do on LinkedIn. Sam Meder, who had run engineering at a start-up acquired by Pinterest, agreed to start it with her.

Ms. Miller also saw Doxa as a way to address diversity issues. The statistics in technology are particularly bad. On average, 30 percent of employees at big tech companies including Google, Facebook and Apple are women, 5 percent are Latino and 4 percent are black. A diversity industry has sprung up to teach companies how to become more inclusive. Engineers attend training sessions on unconscious bias. Companies are hiring corporate diversity chiefs.

Ms. Miller thought Doxa could help by offering data that research shows is important to women — the gender pay gap and the percentage of women on the executive team — as well as factors like whether women felt they were given credit for their ideas. But first, she needed to raise money.

Venture capitalists, who hold the keys to success in Silicon Valley by providing start-up money, are even more likely to be white and male than tech company employees are. Theirs is an insular business. Most investors accept pitches only from entrepreneurs who come through an introduction, and they tend to finance people who have succeeded before, or who remind them of those who did.

According to a 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences, investors prefer pitches by men, particularly attractive men, to those by women, even when the content of the pitch is the same. In addition to studying the results of three entrepreneurial pitch competitions, the researchers conducted two experiments in which a representative sample of working adults heard identical pitches in male and female voices. Sixty-eight percent of people preferred to finance the company when it was pitched by a male voice, while 32 percent chose the female.

Venture firms with female partners are three times as likely to invest in a company with a female chief executive, according to the Diana Project at Babson College. Yet just 6 percent of partners at venture capital firms are women.