In 2024, start-ups founded by women received just 2.3 per cent of global venture-capital funding, compared to more than 83 per cent for all-male founding teams. Being female as an entrepreneur still shapes access to everything from venture capital and private equity funding to bank loans – and this capital gap is shaping who gets to build the innovative companies of the future.

“Capital should follow potential, not gender,” says Maria Chau, COO of The Women’s Foundation. “Yet women entrepreneurs continue to face barriers across the funding journey. Research suggests that access to investor networks, who makes investment decisions and how opportunities are assessed can all shape funding outcomes.”As Chau observes, gender bias is an issue at every stage of the funding journey. It affects who gets their foot in the door in the first place, what questions they get asked when they pitch, how risk and growth potential are assessed, and whether they can secure funding of comparable scale to that secured by men throughout the growth of the business.

Women only represent about 15 per cent of VCs. That means women often get a less receptive ear for their ideas, says Maaike Steinebach, founder and CEO of Femtech Future, which advises female-focused start-ups.

“I feel there is definitely gender bias. For a lot of VCs and key decision makers, it’s very hard to relate to the things that female entrepreneurs come up with.”Women entrepreneurs can face a compounding disadvantage when they struggle to secure early-stage investment, says Harshika Patel, Asia CEO of JP Morgan Private Bank. Venture capital and growth equity often depend on personal introductions and established relationships, potentially putting women without access to those networks at a disadvantage.

For women founders, widening access to networks and connections can be just as important as widening access to capitalKanas Chan, HSBC Private Bank Without sufficient early funding, founders can struggle to build the scale, governance and track record required to attract later-stage private equity investment. That can also leave founders “with a thinner financial history, less collateral and less robust documentation, making bank underwriting requirements harder to meet”, Patel says.

The World Economic Forum (WEF)’s 2025 report “Transforming Capital for the Next Era: Gender Parity and the Expansion of the Investable Frontier” tracks the gender gap in health, education, economic participation and political empowerment. While the first two have closed dramatically over the past decade, there’s been far more modest progress with the latter two.

Silja Baller, the WEF’s head of economic inclusion and one of the lead authors of the gender gap report, comments that: “Women are under-represented among the people making investment decisions. That underrepresentation also comes with less diversity in terms of both risk and opportunity perception.

“Part of the explanation is who’s in the room when the decisions are made, part is how you’re judging it. Are you bringing a diverse range of views to the table?

“The study shows that the quality of decision making gets higher the more diverse the views around the table; you work less with implicit assumptions.”Women entrepreneurs face greater scrutiny than their male counterparts, Steinebach says. While men are more often questioned about a business’s potential, women face questions about family responsibilities and are expected to demonstrate their ability to manage risks, lead teams and sell to large corporate clients.

“There’s a bigger evidentiary burden: more proof, more pilots, more technical validation,” she says. “The same bias you see in corporates, you also see in the entrepreneurial space.”Indeed, an often-cited study from Harvard University found that when male and female founders presented identical pitches, 70 per cent of VCs preferred the men’s.

There are some less obvious sources of friction: for example, about a quarter of countries globally limit women’s property rights, which deprives them of a valuable potential source of loan collateral. Additionally, in many places, women are also more likely to lack a significant credit history.

There are, of course, also issues on the demand side – Africa is the only region of the world where there are more female entrepreneurs than male – with women often simply lacking the opportunities to even consider becoming an entrepreneur. And the funding gap can be self-perpetuating, its very existence deterring some women from even seeking funding, discouraged by the current landscape from believing that they stand a chance of success. Then there’s everything that comes with funding: principally, a network of people.

“HSBC Private Bank research shows that female business owners are six percentage points less likely to have a mentor providing business advice and guidance.”Ruby Yiu, head of emerging business at OCBC Hong Kong agrees, adding: “We have observed that many women entrepreneurs are looking for more than financing alone. They also value access to business networks, relevant knowledge, greater market visibility and practical opportunities that can help them realise their business aspirations and grow with confidence.

“Financial institutions and other ecosystem participants can each play a part in creating a more supportive environment for women-led businesses.”There are some industries where female access to capital is more equitable, but they tend to be stereotypically feminised ones such as education, healthcare and – perhaps most of all – fashion and beauty. Even when women do attract funding in these sectors, they still do so at a lower level than men in the sector, and these “feminised” sectors attract far smaller deals than others dominated by men, like enterprise software and cybersecurity.

There can also be a further challenge of sustaining funding as a company develops, adds Steinebach. “Things that do get funding – the more they develop, it becomes harder. It really is a question of: the more a company makes, when it should theoretically become easier, the harder it becomes.”Parity isn’t just something that VCs and other investors should strive for because it’s the right thing to do; inequality ensures that capital is allocated sub-optimally – especially when you consider that women generate 78 cents per dollar invested, versus 31 cents for men, according to a 2021 report by UBS.

The same study found that if women had the same entrepreneurial opportunities as men, global GDP could rise by 3 to 6 per cent, adding US$2.5 trillion to US$5 trillion to the global economy.

“We’ve moved from exclusion towards underutilisation,” says Lemuel Lee, head of Hong Kong, BNP Paribas Wealth Management.

“Dedicated funds, angel networks and gender-lens strategies barely existed a decade ago. Investors increasingly treat this as a question of opportunity, not just corporate responsibility. Backing women-led businesses is a sound way to widen the opportunity set. It shouldn’t be treated as charity.”There are some positive signs in Hong Kong according to “Tipping the Scale”, the 2025 report from the Women Chief Executives Hong Kong, KPMG and The Women’s Foundation. Importantly, there is, for instance, a growing number of female angel investors and women-founded VC firms.

“I’d say there are a lot more people really supporting [greater equality] and seeing more opportunity,” says Steinebach. “It will make a very big difference if there are more female pen holders.

“What I do see [already] is more angels – women who want to invest in companies founded by women.”Perhaps the greatest opportunity lies in the fact that women are expected to control more wealth globally in the future – from around one third of all retail financial assets in the EU and US today, to about 40-45 per cent, or around US$113 trillion, by 2030, according to McKinsey & Co.

“Women are at the core of the great wealth transfer,” says Baller. “At the moment, in many cases women are the owners of wealth but not the decision-makers in how capital is allocated. There’s an opportunity for women to also become the decision makers.”