From PitchBook and All Raise. All Raise’s partnership with PitchBook on this report depicting female founders, female leaders and the overall venture ecosystem both confirms prior All Raise analysis on the state of women in startups and adds new insights about where the market can go from here.

The analysis on funding differences by geography and sector provides actionable data for entrepreneurs and important reflection material for the venture capitalists who fund them. For example, a VC fund investing in fintech can now compare the percentage of female founders in its portfolio to the market to determine if work is needed to diversify its pipeline and/or evolve its investment committee process. This report also illustrates specific geographic regions where companies with female founders thrive and where they fall below the US average.

From Arjuna Capital and Proxy Impact. For Equal Pay Day 2020, Arjuna Capital and Proxy Impact compiled the third quantitative accounting of current pay disclosures, performance, and commitments among corporate leaders and laggards in four industries: finance, technology/communications, consumer, and healthcare.

The Gender Pay Scorecard (GPS) offers a template through which to view corporate best practice, ranking companies on quantitative disclosures (not qualitative assurances), commitments to report numbers annually, global coverage, and goals to close the gender pay gap. The companies in the ranking have all been engaged by investors through the shareholder proposal process and asked to improve their public pay equity disclosures.

The GPS looks at 50 major U.S. companies, only three of which–Starbucks, Mastercard, and Citigroup–receive an “A” grade. A failing grade of “F” is awarded to half—25—of the total group of companies, including Goldman Sachs, Oracle, McDonalds, and Walmart. Ten companies (in order of rank) —Nike, Bank of New York Mellon, Progressive Insurance, Apple, Pfizer, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, American Express, Intel, and Bank of America, Reinsurance Group—garnered a “B” grade for their efforts to disclose and act on their gender and racial pay gaps.

From the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI). There is significant evidence that women entrepreneurs face unique challenges in starting and growing businesses, particularly in emerging markets. Acceleration programs represent one potential model for overcoming these challenges through support services and investment. Using GALI data on more than 14,000 ventures across 160 countries, this knowledge brief examines trends in the acceleration of women-led ventures.

Key Takeaways:

• Women-led ventures are under-represented in acceleration. Within the GALI dataset, 52% of founding teams are made up entirely of men, followed by 35% with both men and women, and only 13% comprised entirely of women entrepreneurs.

• Women-led ventures have less investment coming into acceleration, and appear less investment oriented than men-led ventures. By the time they apply, men-led ventures are more than twice as likely than women-led ventures to have secured some equity investment. In addition, women-led ventures have lower fundraising targets and are less likely to prioritize "access to investors" as a benefit of the acceleration experience. However, even when controlling for a range of venture and founder characteristics, there remains a statistically significant gender gap in equity financing.

• Acceleration alone does not close the gender financing gap. The equity gap persists in acceleration: Men-led and women-led ventures that participated in accelerators were similarly likely to increase their annual revenue and full-time employees, yet women-led ventures raise on average nearly US $100,000 less in equity as men-led ventures and secure less than half as much new debt.

• Representation within programs has an impact on gender diversity of applicant pools, but it’s unclear what methods actually help women-led ventures grow. Having more women on selection committees and as mentors is associated with more women-led ventures in applicant pools and cohorts. However, when it comes to program design, interviewed accelerator representatives hold a range of perspectives on how to support women entrepreneurs, demonstrating a lack of consistent understanding of the issues and best practices on addressing the challenges.

From Illuminate Ventures. Illuminate Ventures surveyed over 1200 Tech founders and VC investors and gained a better than 30% response rate. The founders were asked about their motivations as well as their perceptions regarding key success attributes and barriers to entrepreneurial success. Venture capital investors responded to the same questions and were also asked to rate the likelihood of the success attributes being displayed and the probability of the barriers having an impact, based on the gender of an entrepreneur.

While the survey data showed that men and women startup founders think quite similarly about their entrepreneurial motivations and the personal attributes that impact success, it also revealed some very important differences regarding the barriers they believe they face and how VCs think about each group. The investors, both male and female, had quite different views of how gender impacts entrepreneurship than the founders – rating men more likely to display many of the success attributes and assuming that women are more impacted by the barriers.

More women are working in the alternatives space than two years ago, specifically at private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund firms. Globally, the proportion of alternative assets employees that are female has grown to 19.7% from 18.8% in 2017.

Although this represents real gains, across all private capital and hedge fund industries, women are still underrepresented and there are significant variations in female representation across asset class, geography and seniority.

The data in this report has been compiled using Prequin’s database of over 200,000 industry professionals to highlight the trends in the workforces of active fund managers and investors.

From 2X Challenge. This guidance note sets out a suite of indicators, mapped to the 2X Challenge criteria, that can be used by investors to:

• Establish and monitor the gender impact of their investment (irrespective as to whether it is 2X Challenge eligible); and

• Determine eligibility for the 2X Challenge

The guidance also shows how the 2X Challenge indicators map to metrics within the IRIS Catalog of Metrics. The primary purpose of this guidance note is to advise on the application of the 2X Challenge indicators.

The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship (The Rose Review) was born out of a sense of frustration at the unacceptable disparity which exists between female and male entrepreneurs and the slow progress in closing this gap. The prize at stake is significant – representing £250 billion of economic potential for the UK. This progress report, published one years on, tracks progress against eight clear recommendations put forward in the original review, alongside what steps still need to be taken.

Women have made advances in the United States and around the world in recent decades, but they have not achieved parity with men on socioeconomic measures ranging from pay and access to capital to representation on the boards of major corporations. A growing body of evidence suggests that there is not only a moral argument for investing in women, but a business case as well. This guide is intended as a practical guide for individuals and institutions interested in learning about investment opportunities that help advance women.

Equal Measures’s research report is based on their EM2030 SDG Gender Index, and finds that half of countries studied (67 out of 129 countries) – home to 2.1 billion girls and women – won’t achieve any of five key gender equality targets by 2030 if their current pace continues. The report covers: access to contraception, girls’ education, political leadership, workplace equality laws, and safety. However, the report also finds that if all countries matched the pace of fast-moving countries over the next decade, nearly three quarters of the world’s girls’ and women could instead live in countries that would reach four or even all five of these gender equality targets by the year 2030.

In this report, Rhia Ventures illuminate the link between access to comprehensive reproductive health care and business performance. Companies that provide care that include contraception and abortion coverage have improved rates of not only attracting and retaining employees, but building a strong pipeline of talent while delivering on diversity and inclusion goals. Ultimately, having a positive impact on a company’s bottom line and being prepared for increasing scrutiny from stakeholders.

From The Business Times. Gender lens investing in both fixed income and equities grew out of evidence that companies with higher women-in-leadership (WIL) metrics outperformed on a range of financial and share price criteria.

In partnership with MVISION, private equity research sponsors, the Private Equity Observatory at HEC Paris investigated the relationship between gender diversity and performance in the mature private equity markets of Europe and North America. The data set was 2,454 deals executed by 51 fund managers across 220 funds over 20 years. Based on these deals, the study made informed assumptions about the gender composition of investment committees using the data available.

Among the 63 economies surveyed in both this and the last report, GEM found that Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) among women increased by 10 percent, and the gender gap (ratio of women to men participating in entrepreneurship) narrowed by 5 percent. The 2016/17 GEM Women’s Report also adds a new consideration—that of women as entrepreneurial investors. While participation rates vary, the participation of women as investors suggests a strong resource foundation from which business owners may build.

This issue brief, part of a series published by ANDE in 2019, is designed to create a common knowledge base from which the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector can work in the hopes of advancing towards selected development goals. This brief focuses on SDG 5.

While the majority of investors perceive the funding landscape as balanced, their actual investments in multicultural and women-owned businesses are highly skewed. In their 2018 survey, Morgan Stanley find out by just how much.

Equal Measures 2030’s Gender Advocates Data Hub is a go-to resource for data, visualizations and impact stories showcasing data-driven advocacy on gender equality issues across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Explore the state of gender equality across 129 countries covering 95% of the world’s girls and women through their 2019 SDG Gender Index.

The 2019 SDG Gender Index measures the state of gender equality aligned to 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 129 countries and 51 issues ranging from health, gender-based violence, climate change, decent work and others. The 2019 SDG Gender Index provides a snapshot of where the world stands, right now, linked to the vision of gender equality set forth by the 2030 Agenda.

By Calvin Miller and Linda Jones. This book provides a comprehensive look at the models, tools and approaches used by industry leaders in all parts of the developing world. These are described, analyzed and illustrated using many rich examples in order to demonstrate how they work and to extract lessons and applications for others to adapt. The book includes 40 industry examples and 5 comprehensive case studies to enrich learning.

From the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11 by FAO makes the business case for addressing gender issues in agriculture and rural employment. The agriculture sector is underperforming in many developing countries, in part because women do not have equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. The gender gap imposes real costs on society in terms of lost agricultural output, food security and economic growth. Promoting gender equality is not only good for women; it is also good for agricultural development.