Today someone said something to me and instantly I felt that moment of fury.
I attended a brilliant event this week hosted by David Horne to raise awareness on the fight for fairer funding. We heard from inspirational Female Founders, telling their story and the struggles they had to raise funds to grow incredible ideas. All of which are now successful.
It was wonderful to hear the good stories of success, and yet David shared a few depressing facts. In 2020, 2.4% of VC funding went to Female Founders. In 2021, that dropped to 1%. If you have a male Co-Founder you fare slightly better, with 15.6% of funding in 2021. Male Founders/All male teams receive 83.4%. Women are disadvantaged from the outset. The bias towards Female Founders is rife. WoMo is raising £1.5m EIS as I write, and learning these numbers felt like a really painful kick in the guts. David is doing a great job to shift the mindset, and to have men championing women is part of the journey. We MUST break the bias.
So imagine my shock today, when a man said to me 'Oh I guess you needed to flirt with that (male) investor to get him interested?'. This is the type of comment we deal with as women. To be building a professional relationship with a man, who is interested in WoMo, apparently it would involve flirting. If a man was building a business relationship with a man, or a woman for that matter, no one would ever say such a thing. I was livid.
It made me think of the other comments we deal with as women. I used to travel a lot with my corporate job, and was frequently asked 'who is looking after the children?'. Do men get the same question on a work trip? Even a girls weekend away. Boy trips seem acceptable yet as a women, a couple of days away with the girls is often met with the same question 'who has the kids?'.
Earlier in the week, I went to a wonderful dinner of Female Investors and Female Founders. 16 of us at one table in a restaurant in London. At the end of the evening as we were leaving, a man from the adjacent table came over and asked if we were a Mums group. He could not have been further from the reality. And the suggestion was outrageous. A group of women out for dinner, and we were labelled as a Mums night out, through his bias.
Just to begin to close off my rant, just this week one of my teen daughters was told 'that's great for a girl' following a sport race she competed in. 'FOR A GIRL!'. What does that even mean? She did great. That's it. 'For a girl' is derogatory and projects she could have done better as a boy. Enough.
We are told as Female Founders, we need to calm down or we are labelled difficult. We are seen as less capable before we have even opened our mouths. This has to stop. It is time men worked harder to champion the women. It is not the Female Founders that need to change, it is the attitude of the industry and the bias towards women. Women are doing incredible things. As David highlighted during his talk this week, if women were invested in at the same rate as men, it could at £250bn to the UK economy.
1% investment in Female Founders is shameful. Things need to change. Now.
By WoMo Founder, Elizabeth Cowper
Original article written for Linked In