Country&Townhouse

There are more women founding businesses than ever, but what’s really holding them back from scaling up is equitable access to funding. Lucy Cleland investigates the funding gap when it comes to female founders.

Why Do Women Face A Funding Gap When Founding Companies?

‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ crooned Rex Harrison in the musical My Fair Lady nearly 50 years ago. Those lyrics still very much resonate today, especially when it comes to women entrepreneurs and the VCs that dish out the cash to help them scale their businesses. The statistics speak for themselves: according to the 2022 Rose Review, although female-founded businesses account for a record share of new firms, there’s a clear funding gap with total venture capital investment levels in them remaining at a miserly one to two per cent. So what are the barriers? How can we overcome them and what do female founders think is really going on?

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