The average founder of the fastest-growing startups in America is 45, according to a study by researchers at MIT, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania , providing proof that experience drives outsized success. At the same time, when it comes to venture funding, women in that age group are almost completely ignored.

According to PitchBook , startups with all-women founding teams received only about 2% of total U.S. venture capital in 2024, and that number has barely moved in more than a decade.

The Investment Gap That Won't Close

Despite growing evidence that women-led companies are better investments, the funding gap continues unabated.

A 2018 Boston Consulting Group analysis of five years of MassChallenge accelerator data, which is still the most-cited research on this topic, found that startups founded or cofounded by women generated 78 cents in revenue for every dollar invested, compared with 31 cents for male-founded startups. Those figures hold even though investors gave women-led companies less than half the funding of their male counterparts: $935,000 versus $2.1 million, respectively.

That gap has not closed in the years since. A 2025 Female Founders Fund report cited by Inc. Magazine found that female founders continued to generate the same 78 cents on the dollar, compared with 31 cents for male founders, while also burning 15% less capital: an average of $270,000 a month, versus $320,000 for U.S. startups overall.

Women leadership at venture firms is likewise less than robust: Women hold only about 17.3% of decision-making roles at U.S. venture firms with at least $50 million in assets, according to the 2025 PitchBook report. And female founding partners, the people with direct authority over a firm's investment decisions, make up just 2.4% of all partners, according to a 2022 Crunchbase analysis.

Many women aged 45-plus are opting out of the investor conversation altogether for reasons that include not realizing funding paths were available to them and that they watched it up close and decided against it.

'I Didn't Even Know Funding Was Available'

Jeannie Stumne falls into the first category. Stumne spent 20 years at the University of Minnesota, the last 15 as director of career services, before leaving at 46 while navigating a divorce, burnout and what she now recognizes as perimenopause-driven upheaval.

She built Shine Brighter , a business helping mid-life women reconnect with their nervous systems through somatic practice. Funding, she said, was never part of the plan because she did not know it was an option.

"I didn’t even know funding was available," Stumne explained. "I don’t know how I would even appeal to an investor. Like, how do you even do that?"

When Stumne looked into business loans, she ran into a familiar catch: Most lenders required an established business with a year or two of revenue history. As a first-year founder, she didn’t have it. So she self-funded, using savings and the proceeds from selling her house, while building a client base with the help of a business coach.

Joanna Bloor , on the other hand, spent decades inside the Silicon Valley funding industry before deliberately deciding to stay out of it.

She worked for four companies that went public and understands the venture math from the inside; she remembers watching Pandora's founder pitch investors "300 something times" before the company found its footing. When Bloor launched her own consulting and speaking business more than a decade ago, and later turned down an investment offer from a publishing company, she says the decision came down to control.

"No one else gets to be the boss of me," Bloor said.

Taking outside money, she added, would have meant reshaping her business into something "scalable" and "repeatable," a model she says does not fit the unconventional, judgment-driven work she does.

Bloor also points to a pattern-matching problem among investors.

"Potential is invisible until it's obvious," she says.

Pitches that do not fit an investor's existing mental model of a fundable company get dismissed, not necessarily on merit, but because they cannot be measured against something familiar.

Bloor’s experience tracks with what BCG's researchers found when they interviewed investors directly.

Women founders, they reported, face more pushback on basic technical competence but are more likely to accept blunt criticism as valid feedback rather than push back. Male founders tend toward bolder, more aggressive projections that read as ambition, even when the underlying numbers are less realistic.

None of this means women 45 and older are not building serious businesses. Instead, they are building them without the tool meant to accelerate growth, and largely without anyone reckoning with what that costs the broader economy.

If startups led by women turn each invested dollar into more than double the revenue male-led startups do, the funding gap is not only a fairness problem. It is a return-on-investment problem the venture industry has so far chosen not to solve.