As part of the recent International Women’s Day this month, we celebrated the accomplishments of female founders everywhere and we championed gender equality in the technology industry. In fact, this year’s IWD theme was, ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.’ That’s why it’s disappointing that only very small percentages of funding went to female-founded businesses last year – in Australia it was only 3% and in many other parts of the world it was even lower.
In the US, just 1.6% of venture Capital (VC) funding went to women-only startups in 2022 — decreasing from 2% the year before. And this gap holds true throughout the world with varying severity. Ultimately, women still receive less than $3 of every $100 flowing into the market.
The difference in funding amounts is noticeable.
- In Australia, only 3% of funding went to all-women founded companies during 2022, up slightly from 2% in 2021. And there were 10% with at least one female founder, down from 21% in 2021.
- In the UK, only 2% of funding went to female-founded businesses with female founders, giving 10% more equity away to VC firms during 2022 (43% compared to 33% from male-founded companies).
- In Germany, only 1% of funding was invested in female founded teams; 12% to teams with at least one female founder.
- In Europe,* only 1% of funding was invested in female founded teams with 8.8% to teams with at least one female founder.
- In India*, only 0.3% of funding was invested in teams with only female founders and 13.4% to teams with at least one female founder.
- In Southeast Asia*, only 0.6% of funding went to all-female founded teams, while 16.4% went to teams with at least one female founder.
*data from 2021
Looking into the results of this in more detail
The UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2022 report spotlights a $1 trillion gross domestic product (GDP) loss as a result of women being excluded from the digital world. If left unchecked, this delta could grow to a loss of $1.5 trillion by 2025.
With mobile apps underpinning significant advancements within the tech space, a company called data.ai took a look at the state of VC funding flowing to female-founded mobile startups and pulled prime data points so we could all see what’s happening.
Household, Female-Founded Brands Performed in Top 1% of Mobile Apps:
We took a look at a selection of apps with female founders to map how they perform against their peers in their App IQ subgenre and relevant country. Grab, Flo and Bumble all rank in the 99.8th percentile of their subgenre (food and grocery delivery, women’s health and dating, respectively) for downloads — leading the way in the market. Of the ‘household names’ analysed, all rank above the 96th percentile for downloads in 2022.
For more information, take a look at the graph below which outlines the percentile of downloads of a selection of female-founded apps:
For more information on this topic from data.ai visit here.
For more from Women Love Tech on female founders, visit here.