Please Sponsor Women Start-Ups

Last week Claire Cain Miller posted an article in the NYT that identifies a lot of facts that continue to demonstrate the challenges of women in the start up world. How come women own 40% of all small businesses but only gain 8% of venture backed tech start-ups. And also among venture capitalists only 14% are seriously managed by women.

Claire's article also linked to an interesting piece of research that women run venture backed start ups usually have 40% less capital than men. This maps to another article I blogged about a while ago that points out that women are more likely to under-sell their business opportunity, preferring to have a conservative outlook, whereas men are more likely to over-sell their business opportunity. And given we all respond to marketing and positioning its easy to see why you'd give your money to the opportunity that is going to make the most. Always remember with these posts that I am not making any point whatsoever that men are out there deliberately overselling, or men are deliberately not giving venture capital dollars to women - there are a lot of influences at work. However it is sad to read in Claire's article that still out there in the world of SVC capital funding world there are some chauvinistic bias that comes into play - I truly hope that is in the minority of cases, but under funding due to unintended bias is probably more the serious downer on women and accessing funds.