Are Investors Biased Against Women? Analyzing How Gender Affects Startup Funding in Europe

TL;DR

This study investigates gender bias in European startup funding, revealing that female founders generally face disadvantages, but experienced female entrepreneurs benefit more from prior startup experience, indicating nuanced biases.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of gender bias in European startup funding using Semantic Web technologies, highlighting the impact of founder gender and experience.

Findings

Female founders face lower funding amounts.

Experience benefits female founders more than male founders.

Gender bias is less for serial female entrepreneurs.

Abstract

One of the main challenges of startups is to raise capital from investors. For startup founders, it is therefore crucial to know whether investors have a bias against women as startup founders and in which way startups face disadvantages due to gender bias. Existing works on gender studies have mainly analyzed the US market. In this paper, we aim to give a more comprehensive picture of gender bias in early-stage startup funding. We examine European startups listed on Crunchbase using Semantic Web technologies and analyze how the share of female founders in a founding team affects the funding amount. We find that the relative amount of female founders has a negative impact on the funding raised. Furthermore, we observe that founder characteristics have an effect on the funding raised based on the founders' gender. Moreover, we find that gender bias in early-stage funding is less prevalent for serial founders with entrepreneurial experience as female founders benefit three times more than male founders from already having founded a startup. Overall, our study suggests that gender bias exists and is worth to be considered in the context of startup funding.