Me-lead vc firms are biased towards favoring men-specific problems

The gender data gap is a great opportunity for businesses but it makes it also very hard for founders to get access to funds from traditional venture capitalists (@criadoperez2020Invisible women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men, chapter 9). Criado Perez cites some examples of women building products for women that struggled to get funded just because men were too biased to recognize the value or to feel any kind of empathy regarding the problems the entrepreneurs were trying to solve.

Some of the examples cited in the book relate to menstruation, brest milk pumps, or pelvic floor exercising. All these products relate to problems faced exclusively by women and therefore they were identified by women. They point to a double data gap, not only from the business perspective, but also to the lack of scientific data. An app to track menstruation, for example, does not only provide value to the women using it, it also aims at collecting data for being used in research.

What is surprising is that the technologies available for women (for example regarding contraception) is technology of over 50 years ago. There was no innovation nor in male contraception nor in improvement of choices for women.

Tags: #gender-data-gap #gender-bias-in-business #gender-entrepreneurs