The 2% Problem: Why Women Founders Are Still Being Shut Out of Capital

If you were designing an investment portfolio from scratch, and one category of asset consistently produced higher returns, faster exits, better capital efficiency, and a lower burn rate, you’d probably allocate more capital to it.

That category exists. It’s women-founded companies. And all-female founding teams still receive somewhere between 1% and 2.3% of global venture capital, depending on the geography and how you count the data.

This is the central contradiction of women’s entrepreneurship in 2026: the performance data is exceptional, but the funding reality hasn’t caught up. Understanding why, and what is slowly beginning to change, is critical for every female founder who will walk into a pitch room this year. We covered the broader entrepreneurship surge in this piece on why female-led startups are still underfunded despite outperforming. This article goes deeper into the structural causes and what the data says about fixing it.

The Numbers, Laid Bare

According to PitchBook’s 2024 All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem report, all-female-founded startups received just 1% of total U.S. VC capital in 2024, down from 2% in 2023. Globally, the figure sits around 2.3% when including European markets. Female-founded companies represented 6.4% of deals but received a fraction of the dollars, meaning fewer opportunities to pitch and smaller check sizes when funding is secured.

The deal size disparity compounds over time. All-male founding teams raise significantly more per round than female-only teams, limiting the scale of companies women can build, not because of the ambition or capability in the room, but because of what happens before the term sheet is written.

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