According to Kanze, only around 2% of VC funding goes to women entrepreneurs, despite the facts that women own 38% of U.S. businesses and now represent 7% of VCs, up from 3% in 2014. Meanwhile, 66% of questions posed to women entrepreneurs were prevention-oriented, tending to focus on potential risks or seemingly test whether women had 'done their homework' for the project, so to speak. The team also found that, among comparable companies, those that received mostly prevention-oriented questions raised an average of $2.3 million in aggregate funds through 2017, while those that fielded mostly promotion-oriented questions raised an average of $16.8 million, or seven times more. "In fact," Kanze noted, "for every additional prevention question asked of an entrepreneur, the startup raised a staggering $3.8 million less, on average." "Similarly, ordinary investors gave an average of $96,321 to the prevention question, promotion answer condition--1.7 times larger than the $55,377 average given to the prevention question, prevention answer condition."

Source: Forbes July 06, 2017 18:22 UTC