Women Outperform Men in Seed Crowdfunding

Women Outperform Men in Seed Crowdfunding
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New report by PwC and The Crowdfunding Centre shows that while more men use seed crowdfunding than women, women are more successful in reaching their finance goals than men in all sectors and geographic regions across the globe. The report findings, which are based on two full years of seed crowdfunding data, include the results of over 465,000 seed crowdfunding campaigns from nine of the largest crowdfunding platforms globally.

The report finds that while men clearly use seed crowdfunding more than women, women are more successful at crowdfunding then men. 17% of male-led campaigns reach their finance target, compared with 22% of female-led campaigns. Overall campaigns led by women were 32% more successful at reaching their funding target than those led by men across a wide range of sectors, geography and cultures.

Women-led campaigns performed better in terms of securing their funding goals than campaigns led by men when we segregate the data for every sector and every country. In countries with the largest volumes of seed crowdfunding, the UK and the US, 20% of male-led campaigns reached their targets. Yet female-led campaigns outperformed, with 24% of women in the US and 26% of women in the UK successfully reaching their campaign funding target.

This trend continues in countries where seed crowdfunding is not yet as wide-scale or successful. For example, 11% of female-led campaigns in Africa were successful compared with 3% of male. And in E7 countries (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey), 10% of female-led campaigns reached their goals compared to 4% of male-led campaigns.

Even in what some consider to be more masculine sectors, for example technology, where we see nine male seed crowdfunders for technology ventures to every one female crowdfunder, 13% of women were successful in achieving their funding goal compared to just 10% of men. Similarly, in the digital technology sector, where there are three male-led campaigns to every one female-led, women achieved a 16% success rate compared to just 9% for men.

Significantly more men are seed crowdfunding than women and as result men raise substantially more finance via this channel. Men are also more ambitious in establishing higher funding goals than their female counterparts and we see them dominate in the highest funded campaigns by sector. The report highlights that 63 campaigns raised over $1 million but of these, only seven (11%) were led by women, with the most funded campaign created by a woman placing number 18 on the list.