| I agree that the discrepancy raises questions that need to be answered, but they are not the ones you suggest. Asking if women fund (found?) "as attractive startups as men" is essentially implying that the reason female cofounded startups get proportionally 1/8 as much funding is that women's ideas are not as good as men's. Anyone who wants to raise that question has an affirmative burden to prove it's the case. Do women seek as much funding as men? Honestly, do you really think women are asking for 1/8 as much funding as men? The theory I've seen is that men are funded for potential, but women are founded based on performance. And, doing more with less is a lot harder than doing more with more. What is the success rate of female cofounded startups? According to Business Insider[0], 52 tech companies IPO'ed in 2018. By the percentage of funding, you would expect 1 on average. Since funding is a key component of success in the early days (and, getting past the early days is essential to getting to IPO), I would argue it's entirely plausible that capital constraints are the reason for lack of success. The proper experiment to run here would be to compare companies with a female cofounder to companies with all male founding teams at similar levels of funding. Since startups fail at such high rates (I've seen numbers that range from 60-90%, with the numbers on the low end defining failure as "returning less than 1x"), this would be a very difficult experiment to run given the 5:1 ratio of female cofounded to all male cofounded companies. [0]: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/initial-publ... |