News
Lack of female decision-makers the largest barrier to funding, says survey
Over 95 per cent of respondents acknowledged a fundamental difference in how investors treat male and female founders
The lack of female decision-makers is the largest barrier to closing the gender funding gap, a new survey has found.
Pink Salt Ventures, the UK’s first venture capital firm for female founders, has published the results of its most recent survey, revealing startling new data and attitudes about how male and female founders are treated by investors – and the consequences.
The survey of 90 female founders, was conducted in partnership with Dr Dana Kanze, an expert on gender bias in venture capital and Pink Salt Ventures’ advisor.
The findings showed 97 per cent of respondents acknowledged a fundamental difference in how investors treat male and female founders, with 83 per cent citing the lack of female decision-makers as the largest barrier to funding.
Additionally, the report revealed 76 per cent of participants believed there is a lack of awareness of what a VC-backable business is. The findings, and the actions required, were echoed by leading female and male entrepreneurs.
“Our survey’s results are clear: a fundamental gender funding gap exists, which is to the detriment of female founders looking to scale their firms,” said Samira Ann Qassim, co-founder and partner at Pink Salt Ventures.
“This is a wake-up call for investors to take action to ensure female founders have the same opportunities as males.”
Saloni Bhojwani, co-founder and partner at Pink Salt Ventures, said there is a huge opportunity to drive growth in the industry by backing underfunded talent.
“Generationally speaking, the pipeline of female entrepreneurial talent only continues to grow, and our research shows what the ecosystem needs and is asking for: more dedicated capital, networks and access to scale their companies.”
Dr Dana Kanze, associate professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, said: “These rich insights show the urgent need for investor-side, rather than founder-side, reform.
“Female founders are clamouring for this, and are badly in need of VC funds allowing for cold introductions, plus access to non-financial resources and specific guidance at a time when they are too early for consideration.
“Until female founders receive the funds they need at the valuations they deserve, they won’t participate in the liquidity events that can enable them to become serial entrepreneurs and investors themselves.”
The survey complements conclusions recently reached by the Harvard Business Review that female founders are two times less likely to secure post-seed funding than males and data from Pitchbook suggesting female founders raise less capital at lower valuations and exit their businesses quicker, proving they can do as much as their male peers with less.
Figures like Tamara Hill-Norton, founder of Sweaty Betty, said LPs can get more female founders funded by having a gender focus in their investments.
“I invested in Pink Salt Ventures because it is the first and only fund I know of in the UK – to have that gender lens focus – solely on female-led businesses,” she added.
Irish businessman Bryan Meehan, executive chairman at Blue Bottle Coffee and an LP in Pink Salt Ventures, said: “It is time the global VC industry wakes up to its inherent blind spot in funding females and people of colour.”
By Women’s HealthX
As healthcare organisations navigate tightening compliance mandates, evolving reimbursement frameworks, and shifting health economics, the single most critical asset for leadership is operational visibility into what their industry counterparts are executing right now.
Ahead of the Women’s HealthX marketplace in Boston this December, a cross-functional steering committee of health plans, hospital networks, biopharma innovators, and enterprise employers has launched the definitive 2026 U.S. Health Infrastructure Survey.
The objective of this brief, multi-state index is to bypass abstract market fluff and map out exactly how the country’s elite healthcare stakeholders are practically structuring their 2027 budgets, clinical protocols, and technology procurement guidelines.
Some of the questions we are asking:
- Health Plans & Payers “What is the biggest operational barrier to expanding women’s health coverage?”
- Health Systems & Providers “What is the biggest women’s health priority for health systems over the next 24 months?”
- Pharma & Life Sciences “What is the biggest commercial hurdle facing women’s health innovation?”
- Employers & Benefits Leaders “Which women’s health challenge creates the greatest workforce impact?”
By contributing just 60 seconds of your operational insight to the index, you will ensure your specific sector’s parameters are accurately represented.
In return for your participation, you will secure a priority, pre-ordered copy of the completed 30-page intelligence report when the final data drops this September!
See where your direct peer groups are drawing their line in the sand for the upcoming fiscal year.
Contribute 60 seconds and pre-order your national benchmark report
Women’s HealthX 2026 | From Rhetoric to Results
Encore Boston Harbor | December 3-4 2026
Bypass abstract market rhetoric to evaluate real-world health economics, regulatory compliance mandates, and care delivery systems.
Join the region’s foremost health plan medical directors, hospital COOs, biopharma innovators, and enterprise benefits buyers anchoring our 2026 tracks.
Sahar Abid is a Science Associate at Ema EQ, where she works on cultural sensitivity and bias in AI.
A woman asks an AI health assistant about postpartum depression.
She mentions that her in-laws are telling her to “push through” and skip medical help, even as her symptoms get harder to manage. She never says where she is from or names her background.
The assistant describes the condition and gives her a hotline number. It sounds correct, but it misses what she needs.
That gap is more common than the industry admits, and it points to a blind spot in how we test health AI for bias.
Most bias testing looks at what people explicitly say.
The typical way to check an AI for bias is to label a prompt with someone’s demographic details and see if the answer changes. That catches some problems but misses a bigger one.
Most people do not lead with their identity. They lead with their situation. The woman above told the assistant everything it needed to help her, just not in the form of a label.
Her real question was not only “what is postpartum depression?” It was “how do I get care when the people around me don’t want me to?
When family members hold sway over health decisions, and in many communities they do, advice that asks someone to overrule their family is not something they can act on.
The AI didn’t say anything factually wrong. It answered a different question than the one she was living.
We call this culturally implicit bias, meaning the AI misses the cultural context a situation implies rather than the context a person spells out.
When systems are trained to notice only the explicit cues, they fall back on a default answer built for the majority. For everyone else, the response can feel generic, off-target, or discouraging enough that they stop looking for help.
In health, that is not small. The people most likely to be missed are often the ones the system already underserves.
What we set out to test.
At Ema, we wanted to know how well AI picks up on cultural context that is implied but never stated. So we built our own way to test for it, across a range of communities and real situations like postpartum depression and fertility, using questions that carried cultural meaning without announcing it.
The patterns were consistent. Models often missed the meaning underneath the question. They dropped the specific details a person did share and smoothed them into something generic.
And even when they pointed toward real care, they tended to offer one option instead of choices that might actually fit a person’s life. Any one of those can be the difference between someone following the advice and walking away from care.
Why this matters for anyone building health AI.
Getting this right is the right thing to do, and it also works better.
When an answer reflects a person’s real context, people trust and act on the recommendations more, so they get the help and support they need.
Testing for it is harder than the shortcut most teams use. Swapping a name or a demographic label in and out is easy. Checking whether a model actually understands the human context around a question takes more care.
The shortcut teaches models to perform cultural competence instead of practicing it. No matter how much or how little someone chooses to share, they deserve an answer that is warm, complete, and usable.
A better question.
The bar for equitable health AI should be “does it serve someone who never told you who they are?” It is the harder test, but it determines whether real people get help.
The work of getting there is far from finished, and it is exactly what we are building toward at Ema.
Sources: Naidoo, V., & Chadha, K. K. (2025), Culturally responsive AI chatbots: from framework to field evidence, Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. Souligne, N., & Subbian, V. (2026), FairLogue: A toolkit for intersectional fairness analysis in clinical machine learning models.
Women accounted for 71.4 per cent of global health workforce growth between 1990 and 2023, according to a study covering 204 countries and territories.
The global workforce almost tripled over the period, rising from 40.9m to 122.1m workers.
Women represented 68.9 per cent of all health workers in 2023, but remained concentrated in professions that generally offer lower pay and fewer leadership opportunities.
The study analysed 20 groups of specially trained health personnel, including doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, dentists and community health workers.
Between 1990 and 2023, the workforce grew by more than 81m people, including an additional 18.9m nurses and 8.7m doctors.
In 2023, there were 33.2m nurses, 15.1m doctors, 7.6m community health workers, 6.8m pharmacists and pharmaceutical assistants, and 6.1m dentists and dental assistants worldwide.
Women made up 80.7 per cent of nurses, 96 per cent of midwives and 89.5 per cent of community health workers, while fewer than half of doctors were women.
A similar pattern was seen in dentistry and pharmacy, where women were more likely to work as assistants than as dentists or pharmacists.
Megan Knight, lead author of the study and researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said: “Women have transformed the global health workforce over the past three decades, but they continue to be concentrated in professions that generally offer lower pay and fewer opportunities for leadership.
“Building stronger health systems will require not only expanding the workforce, but also creating equitable opportunities for career advancement, leadership, and safe, supportive working environments.”
Despite the growth, researchers estimated that an additional 34.4m doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists and pharmacists would be needed to achieve moderate levels of universal health coverage.
Universal health coverage means people can access essential health services without experiencing financial hardship.
The estimated global shortage includes 23.9m nurses and midwives, 7.1m doctors, 1.8m dentists and 1.6m pharmacists.
South Asia had the largest estimated shortages, requiring an additional 2.6m doctors and 10m nurses and midwives to reach the study’s benchmark for moderate universal health coverage.
Sub-Saharan Africa also had substantial shortages. Nursing density was estimated at 14.5 nurses per 10,000 people, compared with 121.8 per 10,000 in high-income countries.
At country level, there were 3.2 nurses per 10,000 people in Chad and 3.3 in Madagascar, compared with 171.7 in Belgium and 161.4 in the US.
Dr Annie Haakenstad, senior author of the study and assistant professor of health metrics sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said: “Health workers are the foundation of every health system.
“Although the global workforce has expanded dramatically, millions more doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, and pharmacists will be needed to ensure people everywhere can access essential health services.
“These findings provide countries with minimum thresholds for planning the workforce needed to strengthen health systems and move toward universal health coverage.”
The study estimated that moderate universal health coverage was associated with minimum workforce densities of 23.8 doctors and 64.5 nurses and midwives per 10,000 people, alongside 5.2 dentists and 5.6 pharmacists per 10,000.
Researchers said closing workforce gaps would require continued investment in education, recruitment, retention and working conditions.
They also highlighted gender-responsive policies, including leadership development, workplace protections, paid parental leave and flexible work arrangements, as measures that could support a predominantly female workforce.
News2 weeks agoUK femtech investment surges 194% in a decade, research finds
News2 weeks agoCross-Border Impact Ventures raises US$58m for women and children’s health
Entrepreneur1 week agoApplications close August 18 for Women’s Health Innovation Summit 2026 Innovation Showcase
News2 weeks agoCultural stigma is a barrier to menopause help, black women say
Menopause1 week agoThird of women unaware of perimenopause mental health impact
Hormonal health2 weeks agoMenstrual data is missing a critical layer: The mind
Events2 weeks agoWomen’s Health Week Europe 2026 releases fully populated agenda ahead of October summit
Fertility3 days agoChelsea FC Women to launch first-of-its-kind player fertility fund