PwC, in collaboration with The Crowdfunding Center, is pleased to release this Women unbound report based on two years of seed crowdfunding data from nine of the biggest crowdfunding platforms globally. Learn more about how seed crowdfunding is unleashing female entrepreneurial potential below and join the conversation at #WomenUnbound

Crowdfunding, a FinTech innovation, is a construct that has revolutionised finance raising, enabling budding and established entrepreneurs to get new business ventures to market across the globe. It has also identified a powerful gender dynamic: seed crowdfunding campaigns led by women consistently outperform those led by men.

This report finds that while men clearly use seed crowdfunding more than women, women are more successful at crowdfunding then men. Seventeen percent of male-led campaigns reach their finance target, compared with 22% of female-led campaigns. Overall campaigns led by women were 32% more successful at reaching their funding target than those led by men across a wide range of sectors, geography and cultures.

Female crowdfunding success is in stark contrast to established funding mechanisms for business startups and growth in which women-led businesses continue to face barriers to accessing finance.

In light of these findings we call on governments, funders, business advisors and businesses of all sizes to seize this opportunity to identify, quantify and remove the grey-suit-factor, which remains at the root of this historic inequality in female founders’ access to finance.

This data clearly shows that more men than women use seed crowdfunding, yet globally, women are more successful at crowdfunding than men: 22% of campaigns led by women reached their target, compared to 17% of those led by men. And this is not a collective anomaly, women-led campaigns performed better (in terms of securing their funding goals) than campaigns led by men when we segregate the data for every sector and every territory.

Even in what are considered more masculine sectors, for example technology, where we see nine male seed crowdfunders for technology ventures to every one female crowdfunder, 13% of women were successful in achieving their funding goal compared to just 10% of men.

In territories with the largest volumes of seed crowdfunding, the UK and the US, 20% of male-led campaigns reached their targets. Yet, female-led campaigns outperformed, with 24% of women in the US and 26% of women in the UK successfully reaching their campaign funding target.

This trend continues in territories where seed crowdfunding is not yet as wide-scale or as successful. For example, 11% of female-led campaigns in Africa were successful compared with 3% of male, and 10% of female-led campaigns compared to 4% of male-led in E7 countries (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey). 

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Download the report here : Women unbound: Unleashing female entrepreneurial potential

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