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What is one piece of advice you'd offer to other female founders based on what you have learned? This is one of the questions I asked the many female founders I interviewed as part of the research I conducted to develop Breakthrough Labs. These interviews were fascinating; the academic in me immediately wanted to write a paper using these data -- but I didn't have time! At their core, the interviews helped me understand the needs and pain points of the female founders I would be working with, but they also surprised me in their similarity. I interviewed female founders from all over the UK and several other countries. These women were from different cultures, age groups, professional and educational backgrounds and their businesses were in different industries. Yet their answers to this question were overwhelmingly consistent. Their one piece of advice to other female founders: be resilient . As a founder, you're going to face a lot rejection on this journey and you just have to believe in your idea and keep going. You have to be resilient. The academic literature covers resilience in many fields: Medicine: Why do some people recover from illnesses while others don't? Environment: How can the environment recover from disaster or destruction, whether natural or human-made? Business: How can we build businesses that can survive economic downturn or changes in market or customer base? Psychology - and now education: How can humans suffer great personal hardship and still lead healthy and successful lives? As a solo female founder myself, I'm not enduring anything especially tragic, but I do feel like I'm on an emotional roller coaster sometimes. As I've been building Breakthrough Labs, I have encountered just as many disappointments as victories, and during the disappointing times I often reminds myself of the female founders' advice. I believe in what we are trying to do with Breakthrough Labs (if you don't know what that is, see this and this ) and I know that for things to change, the change needs to start somewhere. Sure, I may throw myself a little pity party every once in a while, but I've been through harder things than this, and I'll keep going. I have resilience. Just like all the female founders we are trying to support.

Do you remember that old saying, "birds of a feather flock together"? As it turns out, this saying is all about the social theory of homophily, which describes the tendency of humans to form relationships with similar others. In a room full of strangers, in other words, you're more likely to gravitate to someone who is the same age, ethnicity or gender as you. After writing our last blog on why female-founded start-ups aren't getting funded , I've seen homophily in action in this arena. In my conversations with female start-up founders, many say how intimidating or off-putting it can be to attend workshops, networking or pitching events that are full of men. The field is starting to recognize this: there are incubators or accelerators (other than Breakthrough Labs) with women-only cohorts and there is even a movement in investment circles encouraging female investors to fund female entrepreneurs or even set up "women-only" investment funds. All of this seems like positive practice based on the theory of homophily, right? I thought so, too. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across this article by two (female) researchers from INSEAD in France who argue that gender homophily in entrepreneurial finance (specifically women investing in female-founded start-ups) can actually be detrimental to the future success of the female-founded businesses. The authors based their hypotheses on the significant body of research indicating female founders are held to a different set of standards than their male counterparts and, overall, are appraised more negatively than men. There are many reasons for this, including the "lack of fit" theory discussed in the last blog , as entrepreneurship is thought of as a masculine domain. But it's also to do with the uncertainty involved in early-stage investing. It is very difficult for entrepreneurs to demonstrate and for investors to ascertain quality or predicted future success of a start-up. Unlike men, the literature says, women need additional evidence of their competence, as stereotype dictates that they are less capable and thus provide a less attractive investment opportunity than their male counterparts. The negative side of gender homophily comes into play if the female-founded start-ups received early funding from women investors. This makes it easier for male investors to discount their achievement, as they credit gender homophily rather than entrepreneur competence for the female-founders' success. The results were, quite frankly, depressing. Female-founded start-ups who had received early-stage funding from female-led VCs were two times less likely to raise additional financing . There was no similar effect for male-founded companies , regardless of the gender of their initial funders. Pitches from female-founders who had received early-stage funding from women were rated lower in quality than all other pitches (female founder/male investor, male founder/female investor, etc) due to perceptions of entrepreneur competence. The researchers then conducted interviews with male and female VCs to try to interpret these results. They found that female founders wanted to de-emphasize their gender so that it wasn't seen as a negative point against them (the same was true for ethnic minority founders). The interviews also echoed the theory of homophily in investor/founder relations, as, regardless of gender, respondents expressed a stronger comfort level in investing and working with someone who was "like them". It's obvious that a cultural shift in investment is long overdue. In the meantime, the authors recommend that "well-intentioned" policies encouraging female investors to invest in women are likely to be negative for both the investor and the founder in the longer term. They suggest that women need support -- and financing -- from both men and women in order to be taken more seriously.

Before founding Breakthrough Labs, I worked at three accelerators for edtech start-ups, in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the Americas. As with the field of education in general, there are a lot of women in edtech, so I was somewhat surprised to learn just how big the funding gap is between male- and female-founded edtech start-ups. According to Brighteye Ventures European Edtech Funding report for 2022 , globally, male-founded edtech-start-ups received $15.5 B in funding while female-founded teams received only $0.5B. In the UK, the proportion of capital received by female founding teams has gone down since 2017 (4.4% of funding) to only 2.8% of funding in 2021. As a researcher and someone who works with some incredible female founders, I wanted to understand why this disparity exists. As it turns out, there's a fair amount of research conducted by organisations as varied as governments , consulting firms and academia , addressing the gender-based funding gaps that occur across industries. A female-founder friend introduced me to a fascinating and well-publicized study led by Dana Kanze of the London Business School that examines the difference in the questions that are asked of female versus male founders during the pitching process. (See her Ted talk explaining her findings here .) Kanze and her team found male founders typically receive "promotion" questions which allow them to talk about the future possibilities for their business. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be asked "prevention" questions that require them to address the problems their business might experience. Not surprisingly, the research shows that founders receiving more promotion questions are more likely to get funded . Kanze's more recent research examines other factors that might influence why female founders are not getting funded to the same level as their male colleagues. The research is grounded in organisational psychology's "lack of fit" model, which describes the gender bias that can occur when a person of one gender steps into a role or industry in which society perceives they do not fit. The article presents two different studies run by her team with the aim of proving or disproving hypotheses derived from existing research literature about female founders' lack of fit in industries that are traditionally considered male. The research found that lack of fit is yet another factor preventing women from introducing or advancing ventures in male-dominated industries . Specifically: Male-led ventures raised 10 times what female-led ventures were able to raise when they target male-dominated industries. However, there was no significant funding gap between women and men when both were pitching to female-dominated industries . Female-founded companies were also valued significantly higher by investors when their products targeted female-focused industries rather than male-focused ones. This lack of fit did not matter for male CEOs in terms of pitching and receiving funding or experiencing a difference in valuation if their products or services addressed female-dominated industries. Finally, investors retained a significantly higher percentage of equity from start-ups led by women (who retained on average 67% equity) versus those led by men (who retained 74% equity). The investment culture clearly needs to change, but how do we start? I know there is some great work already being done by female VCs and others in the industry. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

There’s a big problem, and everyone seems to know about it. Female entrepreneurs aren’t being funded at anywhere near the same level as their male counterparts. This occurs across industries and countries and hasn’t improved as more women have become investors. According to the State of European Tech Report for 2021 , only 1.1% of all capital raised by tech start-ups went to all-female founded ventures. In my home country, the US, the situation isn't any better: only 2.4% of total VC investments went to companies with only female founders, according to Pitchbook . Here’s why everyone should care about this. Obviously, there’s the issue of equity. Products and services aimed at women should make it to market not just to improve the lives of the women they serve, but because women – who make up 51% of the world’s purchasing power – will buy them. Product testing should be conducted on women and should use women’s data, or we will continue to end up with a world built only for men . Perhaps most important for investors, however, is the large body of research saying that female-founded businesses perform better than those founded by men, delivering both higher revenue and profit. (See this , this and this .) Why aren’t women getting funded? According to the research , there is an inherent bias against female entrepreneurs. They are most likely pitching to men who might not be familiar with products that female-founded businesses market to other women. Women are often more conservative in their pitches, while men are apt to overpitch and oversell. Women are asked more negative questions than men during their pitches, and their businesses are valued lower if they are trying to work in industries that are seen as stereotypically male. So what are we going to do about it? To support women with these challenges and ensure that more female-founded start-ups thrive, we are launching Breakthrough Labs , a long-term support community that offers research-backed support to help female-founded businesses succeed. This website provides you all of the information you need to know about our current incubator, including that applications open in January 2023! But this isn't all we are planning. We want to tackle the big problem of women not getting funded, and to do that we have to address the issues from multiple directions at once. Thus our longer-term plans include the following: So welcome to our journey at Breakthrough Labs. We won't solve the problem overnight, but we are committed to doing something about it. And we hope you'll join us along the way .