Investing with a gender lense

Venture capital firms play an important role in building tech companies and supporting them to accelerate their growth. But women are not being funded equally. Numerous studies show that women face greater personal scrutiny and receive less money from investors during fundraising. To highlight the point, in 2018, only 2% of European VC-backed technology investments went to all-female founding teams, with startups made up of both men and women receiving just 5% of funding.

So why is that? One of the main reasons is that the investment and business angel market continues to be male dominated. Only about 15% of the total angel population are women and just 7% of partners in the world's top investment companies are women. In addition, the historical minority of female founders means a historical minority of female-entrepreneur successes, which makes it harder for women to get funding. 

Closing the gender funding gap is not easy, especially when the contributing factors to this continue to persist. But acknowledging the biases is Step 1 for their elimination. As a society we can and should do more to support female entrepreneurs!