Women can tech too few female led startups govt vcs take note
Nykaa’s Falguni Nayar becomes the first woman in charge of a unicorn. This ‘first’ says much about gender imbalance in startups, and it applies to both founders and funders. An RBI survey showed that just 5.9% of all startups had ‘only female’ founders. Certainly, many more women are starting tech companies now – there were only 26 women-led startups between 1990 and 2010, but 75 more by 2014, and 184 more by 2019 with at least one woman founder. But women-led startups got less than 5% of total funding between 2018 and 2020, according to YourStory Research. The pandemic worsened this: Funding for women-run startups fell 24% in the first half of 2020, found a Makers India study.There are clearly institutional hurdles. The RBI survey found that women had raised about 42.9% of their funds from friends and family, rather than angel investors, incubators or venture capital firms. This sharpens the sense of risk and makes it hard for their businesses to scale up.
This gender bias is unconscious and baked in, and must be countered by governments and investors. For instance, Israel doubled the number of women tech founders in two years after finding out in 2019 that only 8% of its startups were women-led. India needs similar gender-focussed attention. Female-run startups have a ripple effect, they tend to hire more women too. Women in tech deserve an equal chance to grow to their potential.
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