Addressing the Funding Gap: Women Entrepreneurs in New Zealand
“They discovered that for every 100 startups that NZ Capital Growth Partners invests in using taxpayer money, just 6 have all-women founders, while 72 have all-men founders.
It was a similar picture for Enterprise Angels, with 76 out of 100 companies that it invested in being founded by men.”
What if women were funded equitably in NZ’s startup world?
Apparently, at the early educational stages, women are just as entrepreneurial as men…. but they get far less funding than men.
After not finding any local research detailing how much venture capital investment went to each gender, two exceptionally smart women decided to do something about it.
Investor Jenny Rudd and former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung (the first woman to run a large New Zealand public company) have created a report that reviews the NZ investing data.
To support investors looking to level the playing field, they’ve even offered solutions to help improve these stats:
For investment committees to ensure they had no more than 60% of one gender
For investment committees to record their gender data
For no more than 60% of investment funding to go towards one gender
For companies to have no more than 60% of one gender on their boards
It sounds simple on paper, but it is clearly a bit harder to do in real life.
Want to view all the data?