Women entrepreneurs’ financing revisited: taking stock and looking forward

Abstract

It is more than 10 years since the special issue on women and the financing of their entrepreneurial ventures (Leitch and Hill 2006) was published in this journal. At that time, the editors drew on papers presented at the Diana International Research Symposium, held in Stockholm, to provide an overview of extant research into the financing of women-owned/led ventures. Five discrete categories of research were identified: characteristics and behaviours of women business owners; characteristics of their ventures; financial strategies adopted by women business owners, the relationships between those seeking finance (demand side) and those in a position to provide it (supply side) and, perhaps most notably, the impact of gender on women’s ability to rise finance for their ventures. The papers published in that special issue helped to shape a research agenda for scholars to pursue, highlighting the need for research designs to capture the heterogeneity of women business-owners and their ventures; include comparative investigations that give “voice” to women’s experiences of seeking and securing finance; adopt a longitudinal perspective and contribute Marom, Robb, and Sade (2016) similarly confirm well-known financing patterns for women ventures in their analysis of the Kickstarter platform: women ask and raise lower funding amounts compared to men, and they dominate “typical” female projects such as dance, fashion, food. Interestingly though, their data also showed that women, compared to men, were more successful in obtaining their funding. Further, their analysis confirmed a clear pattern of women investors preferring women-led projects, indicating that women entrepreneurs indeed may profit from new funding trends.