Breaking into the boys' club: The rise of women in tech

Picture this. A woman and man pitch their ideas to a room full of investors. Their content is the same. The investors question the man on his hopes, goals, and achievements. What major milestones are you targeting for this year? How do you plan to monetize this?

When it’s the woman’s turn, she gets probed on risk, safety, and due diligence. How long will it take for you to break even? How predictable are your future cash flows? And, finally, what seems to many women entrepreneurs like a deal-breaker: Do you have plans to start a family?

The concerns about potential loss to the business keep coming—they’re a full 67 percent of the questions she answers. She realises later that her male counterparts fielded far more promotion-oriented questions that focused on their businesses’ potential growth, instead of the loss prevention questions she’d faced. 

In the end, the female founder walks away with seven times less funding raised than her male counterpart. On average, she raised $2.3 million against his $16.8 million—on the exact same business fundamentals.

This is the reality of tech’s yawning gender gap. Women entrepreneurs receive much less funding, even as they struggle to break into the industry’s well-known “boys’ club”. 

If you were in that boardroom, would you have guessed that on average, early stage women entrepreneurs generate more than twice as much value per dollar invested than their male counterparts? This, even though they receive around $1 million less in funding. 

Around 2.9 percent of global venture capital funds went to women-led teams in 2019. This fell to 2.8 percent in 2020. As investors became more wary of the uncertain economic climate wrought by the pandemic, they stuck to what they knew best: existing networks and hiring patterns that favoured men. 

This disparity is not new. 

Stories abound of women founders struggling to receive mentorship opportunities that men enjoy in the tech world—or even to get a word in at networking events. Many women have shared how they are taken less seriously than men, even if they have similar levels of experience. 

Imagine having the guts—and the chops—to lead your own company, only to have to constantly work harder than men just to prove that you’re credible and know your stuff. 

Only one in ten senior positions in private equity and venture capital firms globally are held by women. This is often cited as a stumbling block to women entering the start-up world, but a research experiment found that both men and women investors show bias towards male entrepreneurs, giving them more opportunities to showcase their strengths. When genders are hidden, the acceptance rates for women grew from 18 to 30 percent.

That said, women investors are still twice as likely to invest in companies with women on the management teams, and thrice as likely to invest in female CEOs. Thing is, they are rarely at the table in the first place. 

In many places, women cannot access funding, credit support, and familial property. Without institutional support, the support from loved ones can make all the difference. But so many women are still pressured by well-meaning family and friends into holding down more stable jobs or staying at home to fulfil more domestic roles. 

Women in some parts of Asia also lack the freedom to move—either because they are tied to responsibilities at home or because public transport systems are unsafe or inadequate for women. If a woman has to work late hours or has a longer travel commute, for example, she could face more threats to her safety.

Entrepreneurship is hard enough as it is without the added pressure and threats women founders face. These create an environment that can further dampen a woman’s confidence, especially when she sees multiple barriers to her success.

Even in resource-rich countries such as Singapore, women believe they lack technical skills required to start a company, such as coding and financial knowledge. These reservations hold many back from pursuing leadership roles or outwardly displaying ambitions. Research even shows that although coding experience is not a make-or-break factor for a founder, investors tend to grill women founders on these technical skills more than they do men.

Most of the time, women feel they lack what it takes to pursue their goals—and are held back further by cultures that do not support women’s participation in the workforce. 

Women are often scrutinised on their marital and family life at the workplace in a way that men aren’t. Once they have kids, though, most organisations’ policies and systems fail them. A woman might be forced to decline promotions if they deprive her of time with her children—or even take a few years off to focus on her family. This affects the amount of work experience, exposure, and confidence that she needs to succeed in the start-up industry.

The average start-up founder is usually in their early 40s. After cutting their teeth in the industry and finally raising enough capital, budding entrepreneurs run right smack in the baby-rearing age. Women find themselves stuck in this window for an extended period, while men keep on working.

Research has shown that compulsory paid parental leave for both men and women prevents women from falling behind professionally, as childcare responsibilities are shared between parents. Too often, women are their families’ sole caregivers, leading them to return to work much later than men or drop out of the workforce entirely. Companies that offer extended maternity leave for women see return rates of new mums shoot up by 50 percent, helping keep them in the leadership pipeline.

Wherever you go, women take on more caregiving roles. Formally employed or not, women are expected to juggle domestic responsibilities on top of caring for children and the elderly. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, more women dropped out of the workforce, even as women-populated fields saw more lay-offs. 

Under normal circumstances, women do four times as much unpaid care work as men. But as lockdowns keep people indoors and intensify the need to care for others, women face the impossible task of juggling both work and domestic responsibilities at home. 

In recent years, women-centric capital funds, or gender lens investments, have emerged onto the tech scene to support female entrepreneurship and level the playing field for women founders. Their investors zone in on businesses that have women founders or focus on women’s issues—this could be a business that directly improves the lives of women and girls, or simply a company with a female chief executive or technical officer.

In Asia, more women-centric funds are building support mechanisms for female entrepreneurs, while family run businesses are pouring more money into gender lens investments. Asia is the second-most-active region for venture financing by women-led companies, after North America. 

Whether they start businesses out of necessity—in situations of unemployment or economic crisis—or opportunity, women founders are driven by social change. They are 1.17 times more likely than men to start social enterprises rather than purely profit-driven ones, and 1.23 times more likely to start environmental ventures. Close to 40 percent of the world’s social enterprises are run by women; in traditional business, they make up closer to a third.

Compelled to align their businesses with their values, women entrepreneurs tend to address broader issues of social inequity by helping marginalised or underserved groups access products and services. Perhaps because women bear the brunt of discrimination themselves, female founders are driven to fix existing inequities through their work.

Female-focused platforms, such as SheLovesTech, and networks like EQUALS, WeConnect and She Loves Data are but a few initiatives that support and champion women-led start-ups and advance women in tech.

As a global platform committed to closing the funding gap for women entrepreneurs, She Loves Tech (SLT) aims to unlock over US$1 billion in capital by 2030 for women-led businesses. Each year, they host the She Loves Tech Global Competition, the world's largest startup competition for women and technology, to seek out and accelerate the best entrepreneurs and technology for transformative impact. Since 2015, the platform has connected over 8000 startups across the world, with alumni founders raising over $250 million in funding as of 2020.

As more investors lean towards supporting female-led ventures, a wave of start-ups operating at the intersection of technology and female health has risen up. Dubbed “FemTech”, the industry’s products and services are geared towards improving female health—these include pregnancy-specific wearables and artificial intelligence tools that predict fertility-related illnesses.

But women entrepreneurs aren’t just shaking up the industries they’re commonly associated with. Women-led companies worldwide are breaking ground in gender-neutral fields such as education, fintech, clean energy, and agri-technology.

The following female entrepreneurs are finalists from the She Loves Tech Global Competitions 2019 and 2021.

Women-led businesses promise numerous benefits, not just for women and their communities. Hiring and promoting women in tech has been found to improve companies’ overall performance, which makes for more vibrant economies and faster growth. Put simply, women’s inclusion is better for the bottom line.

While women can tap on growing support networks and turn to mentors for guidance, the playing field will remain unequal unless the start-up investment ecosystem reforms its entire process. For starters, having more women at the table could equalize decision-making and prevent gender bias from creeping into the boardroom.

Changing the way investors perceive female founders—so that they have a fair chance of promoting themselves at the pitch stage and securing confidence in their ideas—also makes a big difference. Investors can consider allocating a certain proportion of funds towards women-led companies or reaching out to local and regional organisations that exist to support these businesses.

Women entrepreneurs have lost out to their male counterparts time and time again, due to society’s long-standing bias and expectations of women. It’s time we create an environment for women to claim the opportunities and power that tech has to offer.