Here's my pitch deck, so call me maybe? Exploring drivers behind the gender gap in venture capital in Sweden and the U.S.

Abstract: Despite initiatives to promote gender diversity in recent years, to this day, an unanswered question in the entrepreneurial domain is why male founders tend to receive more venture capital funding than their female counterparts worldwide. The phenomenon of the 'gender funding gap', also persists in developed countries such as, the U.S. and Sweden. By contrasting these two countries, this research aims to further investigate the underlying dynamics that determine the relationship between female founders and venture capital investors. Venture capitalists around the world act as critical gatekeepers and decide which ideas, innovations, and products will enter the free market on a local and global level, and as such are the second most important stakeholders to this issue. Through 11 in-depth interviews with female founders and investors of both genders from the U.S. and Sweden, we identify some of the key factors behind the lack of funding being provided to women. From the analysis it can be concluded that women face several challenges, either caused by innate founder-related or investor-related drivers, as well as less definable factors such as culture. The results of our empirical findings suggest that there are biases against female founders in both countries. Further, it highlights the importance of social networks, including an information gap on this between founders and investors. However, the subject matter is complex, and it is therefore difficult to pinpoint what the most powerful drivers behind these biases are. Further, this study establishes that founders tend to underestimate the importance of the individual founder compared to the business model or product, in the eyes of investors. To get better insights into this issue, we propose future research to include more cross-country comparative analysis to understand why the gender gap is smaller in certain, other developed VC ecosystems.