GoKawiilEmma Yates, chief scientific officer at Proteotype Diagnostics, would like to see more funding and support for founders during parental leave. Credit: Wesley Sukdao, Proteotype CEO
An estimated 25 million women across the world’s most advanced economies are being denied the opportunity to launch and develop their own businesses, and those who do typically have more-modest growth ambitions than male founders, finds a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)1.
According to the Bridging the Finance Gap for Women Entrepreneurs report, published at the end of last year, the gender gap in start-up financing is particularly stark in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sectors. The OECD trawled studies from 2013 onwards, with a focus on ones from the past few years, finding that, globally, companies founded by women receive only about 2% of total venture-capital investments.
Female entrepreneurs are about 63% less likely to secure venture-capital funding than are men, and on average get only 70% of the amount that male entrepreneurs receive. This means that they are less likely to seek loans or investment in the first place, the report warns. One estimate in the report speculates that UK gross domestic product could have been 12% larger than it was in 2017 if women had started and scaled up businesses at the same rate as men did.
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A second report on venture-capital allocation published last year paints a similar picture. It found that of the US$289 billion invested globally in 2024, 2.3% went to female-only founding teams, compared with 83.6% to all-male teams. Mixed-gender teams landed a 14.1% share of the funding pot.
The report, which was published by the London-based entrepreneur-support community the Founders Forum Group, also revealed that during fundraising women are more than twice as likely as male founders to be asked questions focused on risks. They are also interrupted almost five times more frequently than men are during pitch presentations and spend an average of 7.4 months fundraising compared with 5.2 months for their male counterparts.
The findings from these two reports will resonate with many female science entrepreneurs and those who support them. Four women tell Nature about their experiences learning to navigate a funding landscape in an ecosystem that can often seem hostile.
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“Most of my investor conversations have been constructive and professional,” says Emma Yates, chief scientific officer at Proteotype Diagnostics in Cambridge, UK. She co-founded the company with her husband, its chief executive and chairperson, in 2019. “There have been isolated moments where I felt assumptions were being made that a male founder might not have faced, and a few investors were also uncomfortable with a husband-and-wife founding team,” Yates adds.
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