🤷🏾♀️ 2023 🤷🏾♀️ Deep-rooted gender imbalance 🤷🏾♀️
Female founders continue to attract significantly less funding than their male counterparts, be represent in less deals, and raise less on average.
Previously on Africa: The Big Deal: 619+ unique investors were involved in at least one $100k+ deal in Africa in 2023. Almost half of them hadn’t invested in either 2021 or 2022, while 188+ have been investing consistently since 2021.
I have been writing this newsletter for nearly three years now, and each time I focus on gender, I am hoping for a breakthrough. However, progress is so slow - when there actually is any progress - that it can get quite disheartening... That said, it makes such analysis even more important.
So let’s have a look at how funding last year was split based on the gender of the founder, or gender make of the founding team. In 2023, start-ups with a solo male founder or an all-male founding team continued to attract 85% of all funding. If you take into account gender-diverse founding teams, it means that 98% of all the funding was raised by a solo male founder or a founding team with at least a man. Comparatively, start-ups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding last year (2.3% to be exact). Only 15% of the funding was raised by a solo female founder or a founding team with at least a woman.
And very little progress was made on this front compared to 2022: rounded, all the percentages shared above looked the same in 2022. Back then, for every $1 raised by a solo male founder or an all-male founding team, solo female founders and all-female founding teams had raised 2.4¢ (i.e. 41x times less). In 2023, they raised 2.7¢ (37x times less). While this might seem meagre - because it is -, it is the highest it’s been since we started tracking funding on the continent in 2019; in 2021, it was actually barely more than 1¢ (i.e. 99x times less)!
If we want to find some kind of silver lining, we can look at the number of ventures raising, as opposed to the amount raised: of the 200+ start-ups who raised at least a $1m+ round in 2023, 6% had a solo female founder or an all-female founding team, and 26% had a female founder (either a solo female founder or a founding team with at least a woman). Again, there has been no noticeable change compared to 2022. Worryingly, this also means that solo female founders and all-female founding teams raise less on average per $1m+ deal versus solo male founders and all-male founding teams: $4.4m vs. $15.8m (i.e. 3.6x times less).
Focusing on the gender of the founder or founding team is one way to look at things. Another is to concentrate on the gender of the CEO. As you can guess, we’ll be doing this in an upcoming post ;)...In the meanwhile, I’m leaving the usual discount code to our database here, and reminding you of our upcoming lollapalooza LinkedIn Live event on January 17:
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