Gender Bias in Venture Capital Funding for FemTech

For health needs in a sector valued above one trillion dollars, FemTech captures near 2% of worldwide venture capital. That's not a pipeline issue, and it's not when-it-happens either. Two discounts stacked: the hit any female founder eats, plus a second, worse one kept for women's health, a field venture capital still won't treat as real.

How little capital actually reaches FemTech, and where it goes when it does

Tracking shows over $5 billion in FemTech deal value since 2020. But stacked next to total digital health costs, it stops feeling like much. Valley Bank has FemTech investment worldwide at $2.6 billion during 2024, yet its share of digital health investment has fluctuated in recent years.

Where things are heading beats any one annual sum. Recent tracking shows 2025 FemTech funding reached hundreds of millions, with 2026 figures reflecting a continued pullback. Funding has declined sharply, with no plateau in sight. The pullback is steep, and it's accelerating.

When Capital flows, it follows patterns investors already know. The largest institutional capital goes to Fertility benefits, plus clinics like Maven Clinic, Kindbody, and Carrot, largely because contracted revenue from payers is already attached. Pure consumer subscriptions don't see that same break. Backers aren't comfortable underwriting Menopause care, pelvic health issues, or gynecological equipment, so those fields attract the smallest capital share despite huge demand, since they remain at a younger venture stage.

According to Galen Growth data, Many early-stage FemTech startups remain pre-Series A, reflecting the sector's relative youth. Few make it past that point. FemTech unicorns remain rare, despite the sector's growth potential.

The broader VC gender gap that FemTech sits inside

FemTech's funding problem isn't unique to this sector. In 2024, from $289 billion put into VC globally, female-only founding teams took $6.7 billion, or 2.3%. All-male teams took $241.9 billion, or 83.6%. Teams with men and women divided the remainder.

The 2.3% share rose above the 2.1% recorded during 2023, so Founders Forum worked out what such speed means: keeping this clip, gender parity for VC allocation won't happen before roughly 2065.

As companies grow, the gap widens instead of narrowing. Among funded founders, the Female share falls, starting at 3.2% early on and reaching 1.8% by Series C and later, with every round making the gap bigger rather than shrinking. Getting into the funnel proves harder for women: women-led startups captured just 20.5% from first financings during 2024, compared to 26.5% back in 2020.

FemTech founders deal with both issues side by side. They face the usual gender penalty every female founder hits, plus sector-specific skepticism when pitching women's health inside a room where mostly nobody gets it. FemTech companies with a female founder number over 70%, versus roughly 20% for non-FemTech ones, so the founders behind them are disproportionately the ones VC norms are worst equipped to back. Founders Forum says the bill for misallocation is $5 trillion worldwide. This isn't some diversity statistic, it's broken capital allocation.

The specific mechanisms that produce biased funding decisions

This bias appears in side-by-side tests, not only in overall numbers. Research has shown investors often prefer pitches delivered by male entrepreneurs over identical ones from female founders. Research indicates investors often evaluate male and female founders differently, holding them to distinct expectations.

The rest comes down to Homophily. Among VC firms managing more than $50 million in assets, women hold just 17.3% of partner or decision-making seats, per PitchBook's 2024 All In report. Past male bets make up Pattern recognition, a shortcut that investors rely on to judge if any founder seems fundable. Each round keeps building on what came before, rather than fixing it.

This disadvantage is in place long before any pitch occurs. Per Founders Forum data, female founders face barriers in accessing early funding contacts, and a private-fortune gap limits their self-funding capacity ahead of institutional meetings.

Besides everything else, FemTech stacks unease about the topic itself. Investors say outright they’re unequipped to judge a FemTech pitch; unease over menstruation and menopause plus reproductive health feeds the pattern: hesitation grows from unfamiliarity, underfunding breeds hesitation, while underfunding means fewer public wins exist that normalize this category later. A 2025 Venture Capital paper asked 361 VCs worldwide through a hidden format meant to get around normal answers, and that bias surfaced. Founders also report the same from their end: Many female entrepreneurs report encountering gender bias when seeking funding. This is lived fact, not abstract guesswork.

What the performance data actually shows about female-founded companies

Skip the how and focus on what happened. BCG found female founders generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested, versus 31 cents for male founders, more than two and a half times the return. A typical male-led startup keeps getting over twice the funding of a typical female-led startup, while bringing in lower revenue for each dollar spent. This gap isn't about how big the result gets. The price of getting there is the issue.

Data suggests female-founded companies often demonstrate strong capital efficiency and revenue performance over time. Across a ten-year look at its whole portfolio, First Round Capital saw that companies with a female founder at the helm outperformed teams that were all-male by 63%, and female-founded companies made up 3 of First Round's best-ever bets.

This is backed by Exits. The 2024 All In report from PitchBook's shows that female founders reach exits roughly half a year sooner than do male founders, while companies that are female-founded accounted for a 24.3% share of U.S. startup exits, the top mark yet, with only 1.0% in capital. In 2024, Thirteen female-founded companies hit unicorn level, holding a total post-money valuation above $300 billion.

Plainly put: these companies receiving the smallest investments are delivering the strongest risk-adjusted returns across their portfolio. Investors continue stepping past an obvious numbers issue rather than treating it as about fairness.

Why strong returns have not corrected the market

Venture capital is built on a premise: pattern recognition tracks returns. FemTech data reveal it follows familiarity, which is different.

Female founders usually lose the ground they win. Their slice of funding fell amid the 2020 pandemic, then again with the 2022 contraction, precisely the points when a portfolio investor goes risk-off. WEF staff call it "dispensable diversity": the first expense dropped when money gets tight.

A pair of gaps sits below the topline figures, as well. In 2024, Female-founded companies accounted for 6.4% of investments yet just 2.3% from total capital, while Founders Forum data shows female-only founding teams receive roughly fifty percent compared to male-only ones. Even what's available has less money attached. The topline figure might look fine, but dollars ticked upward while 2024 investments in female founders dropped 13.1%, meaning that fewer of these companies actually got funded rather than more.

This won't get fixed by data on its own. Whoever sits there still gets pitches calibrated to their taste, and female founders earning strong returns won't alter what matters for another pitch until someone new takes that decision-making spot.

FemTech has one more gap in studies beyond the issue of funding. In the past, just 4% of R&D in biopharma focused on women, so fewer clinical proof points exist to satisfy what institutional investors demand for diligence. Fewer studies mean fewer comfortable investors, and fewer comfortable investors mean less capital funds the studies that would build that comfort in the first place. Employer-backed maternity benefits and fertility still attract funding because any generalist investor finds them familiar. Menopause remains underfunded just because it seems unfamiliar, even though it outpaces nearly every other subsegment.

Where FemTech investment is moving despite the structural drag

Capital continues to flow. Money flows narrowly now, toward a few pitches that seem safe for investment review.

Maven Clinic took in $125 million during October 2024 for benefits in fertility and maternity care, with a valuation of $1.7 billion. With support from high-profile backers including Amy Schumer, Midi Health secured $63 million during 2024 via a Series B round and SPV add-on to grow its online menopause care service and expand its clinical team. Comanche Biopharma secured $75 million during January 2024 to advance CBP-4888, a preeclampsia siRNA drug, into clinical testing. ReproNovo raised $65 million in May 2025 for next-generation fertility treatments, led by Jeito Capital. Visby Medical secured $55 million during June 2025 to roll out a first FDA-authorized at-home PCR check detecting women's STI, giving answers within 30 minutes.

Together, Maven Clinic, Kindbody, Flo Health plus LetsGetChecked serve as proof points for the sector: digital businesses spanning fertility, care, hormone apps, at-home tests, grown to a stage where later-stage investors can point to names. Famous backers joined in as well. Women's health drew investments from Amy Schumer, Meghan Markle, Emma Watson, and Tory Burch during 2024 and 2025. It changes the category's standing culturally, but it can't replace what big institutional capital funds should do.

In 2025, mom and baby care took 28.9% in FemTech, while reproductive health plus contraception brought in $2.25 billion alone, the areas investors see as steadiest.

Midi Health's round deserves a closer look. Menopause was the very category investors flagged as uneasy territory, yet the round still went through, with recognizable backers on board. This means the discomfort remains unaddressed, not permanent. Still, likelier than reputational, the cause is payer contracting: unlocking capital beyond what a pure consumer subscription or any direct-to-consumer pitch alone could get. This approach deserves attention. The famous-name backers aren't either.

What actually closing the gap requires and what has not worked

Putting women in lower VC roles has not changed allocation, because choices happen higher up, while 17.3% has hardly budged after many pipeline efforts. Firms need to quit funding initiatives that can't fix a problem at the partner-level tier they weren't meant to handle. The pipeline claim falls apart once you run it against the data anyway: founders exist, the returns are real, so the bottleneck sits in how deals get reviewed and who's in the room, not in any shortage of founders.

Training a founder won't correlate to stronger results, but who the decision-maker is will. In Finland's VC market, female founders receive roughly 30% of funding, while the UK and Ireland top Europe on female-founder funding, and both cases show the people calling the shots match the founders getting funded. That pattern shows up with Structured or hidden reviews too, where any pitch is judged by real figures instead of whether the founder seems like someone they know. The same goes for LP influence: with gender diversity data demanded portfolio-wide, GPs change how they act, since a layer above them is now watching.

To change FemTech, investor literacy about clinical areas like menopause, pelvic health, and hormonal issues must grow so unfamiliarity no longer acts as a warning sign. Until then, this space turns out top-tier capital-efficiency results across venture, yet still draws very small investments to go with them.