Imagine all the things we could solve if we could close the massive gender gap in private investment going to founders in Australia.
Just 15 per cent of private investment went to founding teams with at least one female founder in 2024, according to the State of Startup Funding Report.
And just 2 per cent went to all female founding teams.
This is a gender gap we’ve long discussed on Women’s Agenda. But unlike other gender gaps we follow, including the national pay gap and superannuation gap, this is one that has rarely ever moved in the right direction. Indeed, this gender gap has gotten worse in recent years.
The lack of progress comes despite plenty of rhetoric about investors’ desire to close this gap, and despite various desires to help from goverments and supplies. It comes despite numerous stories and programs aimed at teaching or “fixing” women to engage a certain way with the system.
That’s why we wanted to dedicate a series to discussing evidence-based solutions for closing this gender pay gap, via a special six-part podcast series and dedicated section on Women’s Agenda under the banner of What We Could Solve.
The series follows dozens of interviews with founders, investors, academics and others across the startup ecosystem.
It aims to reset the problem to being one about what Australia misses in investors failing to reach more diverse founders.
And it aims to consider just What We Could Solve: in tech, climate, healthcare, research and more, as well as the economic opportunity, jobs, investor return on investment and much more that can be accessed.
In Australia, Boston Consulting Group research in partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation estimated the economic opportunity of boosting the number of female entrepreneurs to parity with men would be worth between $71 and $145 billion.
In the UK, the Investing in Women Code initiative analysed 2024 data and found that all-female founding teams outperformed the market by 1 per cent, while mixed gender teams outperformed it by 10 per cent.
Also, as we know from our research and work on Women’s Agenda, women-founded businesses create solutions to challenges that often male founders – and therefore often male VCs – don’t necessarily see the value in, especially in women’s health, and across challenges facing the care economy, such as in aged care, early childhood education and nursing.
In part one of What We Could Solve, we confront the challenge through the perspectives of several founders at various stages, learning about their experiences and identifying some of the key issues they perceive as contributing to this gap. These founders later shared more on some of the solutions.
The stats are shocking. The lack of progress is disappointing. But this series What We Could Solve isn’t about merely calling out the problem. Rather, this series hopes to be a call to action for everyone involved in the startup ecosystem to see the massive opportunities ahead, and the very real evidence-based options available to help make it happen.
Some of are some of the key takeaways and founders featured in part one:
Noga Edelstein, founder, UrbanYou. Investor and advisor to startups.
Noga Eldestein left corporate life with her co-founder, Elke Keely, to launch the on-demand cleaning service business, UrbanYou. They became one of a small minority of all-female founding teams to raise money and later to exit the business.
Noga outlines some of the challenges they experienced raising money, as well as the challenges she sees female founders experiencing in 2025.
“There’s a lot of data that says women are asked prevention questions, men are asked promotion questions, and that certainly was our experience. Everyone wanted to pick on the ways it was going to fail rather than get excited in the ways it was going to succeed,” she shares in the podcast.
“We certainly didn’t raise anywhere near as much as our male counterparts, and the valuation we got was nowhere near as high as those male counterparts as well.”
While Noga is now supporting diverse founders across the startup ecosystem, she worries about the feedback loop those who face additional challenges in pitching for funding take on.
“It’s really daunting, and that feeds go into this loop of, like, are women going to go back and do it again? Are they going to become second time founders and put themselves through that journey again? Which just feeds into this archetype of, you know, there’s far less women second time founders, investors like to back second time founders, and it just, it’s perpetual.”
Kirstin Hunter, CEO of Birchal
Kirstin Hunter has viewed the startup ecosystem from different perspectives.
She has been a co-founder and executive in several startups, and she has run the Techstars accelerator as managing director. Kirstin is now CEO of Birchal, Australia’s largest equity crowdfunding platform.
Like Noga, she has witnessed this expectation of change when it comes to closing the gender funding gap. But it hasn’t happened.
“I’ve seen just how difficult it is for women-founded teams and diverse teams, that don’t look like your classic university-educated white male software engineering founder, really struggle to get investors to see them as credible investments.
Working with around a dozen startups a year at TechStars, where they would typically buck the trend by seeing the majority of their cohort having at least one female founder, Kirstin notes dramatic differences she heard between how female and male founders resported their experiences with investors.
“It was in the questions that women founders would get asked compared to the questions that male founders get asked,” Kirstin says on the podcast.
“The most ridiculous example that I have, which is a serious question that one of my women founders got … they were literally asked, ‘If Steve Jobs were to come back from the dead, and because he’s dead, he doesn’t have to follow international laws and conventions, how would you compete?’ Hang on, are you literally asking if zombie Steve Jobs was running a competitive company?”
Kirstin believes both concious and unconcious bias is occuring.
“If the data shows that women-founded businesses are more capital effective, produce stronger returns, then it should be on the VCs to change the way they receive pitches, rather than on the women leaders to change how they’re giving the pitches.
“But I think I’m a little bit sceptical of this view, because I’ve now been working in various roles for 20 years, and I’ve been hearing these messages about women need to just do things differently, and then we’ll break through. If we just “lean i”n more, if we just learn to be more confident in meetings, if we just act more like men, then we’ll be promoted! But if that were true, we would see a much higher representation of women as CEOs, on boards, in investment positions, in successful founding positions, and we don’t.”
Preethi Mohan, Founder of NiceTo & Co-founder of F2F & Press Play Ventures of Overnight Success.
Preethi Mohan is a three-time founder who now advises, coaches, mentors and invests in startups.
She shared some of the added challenges facing founders from diverse backgrounds and the notable differences in their stories, especially, regarding “Prevention Questions”.
“I started noticing the differences in what the stories they were telling me versus the stories that people from the majority funded sort of backgrounds tell me, and they were vastly different the experiences they were going through,” she says.
“And so really started researching and digging into it more, and then thought, I think I can solve this in a way that no one else is at the moment. We need more and more of an effort in solving this. It can be experiences of sexual harassment, and things like that from investors.
“It can be experiences in the types of questions they get, including women getting more of those “prevention questions”.
Jemi Jeng, Founder of Penny.
Jemi Jeng has just launched her startup Penny in the weeks we spoke for this series.
She’s passionate about the business she’s solving which empowers women with financial literacy and confidence to build wealth, and knows full well the challenge it’s solving.
She is self-funded, knowing how difficult it would be to access VC funding for an impact business.
She is open about how challenging it’s been getting started.
And sh outlines another essential aspect to consider when it comes to founders: the vast differences people have in their ability to fail and quickly move on to the next thing.
“If you don’t have that option to fail. You have to think twice, three times as hard about a decision before you make it.
“Just you’re thinking about the finances. You’re thinking about, you know, the impact on the growth of your business long term, the reputation, all these sorts of things that you’re weighing up all the time that you know another founder who might have more resources or for whatever reason, just isn’t pressed in the same way,” she says.
These founders share more in Part One of What We Could Solve, currently available in the Women’s Agenda podcast feed, including on Apple and Spotify. Later, they share more on some of the solutions they believe can be deployed for actually addressing these issues and making a difference on the gender pay gap.