Helping female crypto founders blast off – Cointelegraph Magazine

Bridget Greenwood is the founder of The Bigger Pie, a U.K.-based networking organization that supports women in blockchain globally. She says that even venture capitalists with the best intentions still end up funding male founders at disproportionate rates.

“I stumbled over the appalling statistic that of all VC funding [in the U.K.], only 3% goes to female founders, 8% goes to mixed teams, and the rest goes to all-male teams,” she explains to Magazine.

“And that initial figure has gone down to 1.5% over the pandemic.”

“In more difficult times, it seems that VCs are falling back on what they know – which is to fund male founders. This is doubly frustrating, as research looking at the impact of COVID-19 points to the benefit of feminine leadership during challenging times.”

According to data from Pitchbook, the trend is international. Last year in the United States, startups with all-women teams received just 1.9`%, or around $4.5 billion, of the $238.3 billion in allocated venture capital. The 2022 figure was down from the 2.4% achieved the year before. 

Seeking to actively change this reversal, Greenwood founded The 200Bn Club with Amber Ghaddar. The initiative takes its name from a 2022 report on female entrepreneurs commissioned by the U.K. government and completed by Alison Rose, CEO of NatWest. A key finding was that investing in female entrepreneurship would add between 200 billion and 250 billion pounds to the country’s GDP.

Greenwood and Ghaddar embarked on a three-month research journey, during which they spoke with academics, investors and VCs. Ghaddar had already successfully raised money for her company, AllianceBlock, so she personally knew some of the struggles.

As Greenwood summarizes, “We got two key points from our research. The first is that you need a warm introduction. A lot of the VC world is all about networking, and so we have gathered some 200 VCs to be part of our network so we can create these warm introductions.”

“The second point is harder to overcome and happens during the pitching process. As soon as it becomes apparent the founder is a woman, then the unconscious bias kicks in.”

Pitching stage

Research published in Harvard Business Review singles out the pitching stage as a significant barrier for women. In essence, it says that men are asked promoted questions, whereas women are asked preventative questions – which focus on risks and put founders in a defensive position.

“Why is this important? Well, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, if you get asked preventative questions, you are five times less likely to raise money, period,” says Greenwood.

“However, the good news is that if you understand and recognize a preventative question, you can then learn to answer in a promotive way so that you give yourself a much better chance at success. But this needs to be taught.”

At The 200Bn Club, female founders are coached on how to best pitch to VCs, which also includes the somewhat controversial concept of not pitching “like a woman.”

While earlier research suggested that investors exhibit bias against women due to their sex, more recent studies have found that the picture is more complicated than that, and that being a female entrepreneur does not diminish interest by investors in and of itself.

A team of Canadian and American researchers conducted an experiment that found investors are actually biased against displays of feminine-stereotyped behaviors by entrepreneurs, whether from men or women. The research, titled “Don’t Pitch Like a Girl,” found that behaviors coded as feminine were associated with negative perceptions about the entrepreneur’s business competency.

Now, that doesn’t sound any better from a gender studies perspective, but from a practical standpoint, it means female founders can work around the issue by using more masculine-stereotyped behaviors while pitching.

“It turns out that while female founders are happy to talk about their team, they are much more self-effacing when it comes to speaking about themselves. And since the VC wants to invest in the leader, this is a damning habit for female founders,” Greenwood says. 

“We work with our female founders to deliver the pitch with confidence, assurance and faith in themselves. And we help them answer the preventative questions in a promotive fashion.”