Beyond symbolism: fixing tech's gender funding gap

International Women's Day is increasingly arriving with a healthy mix of celebration and scepticism. 

Many women rightly question whether the surge of corporate messaging reflects measurable progress, or whether it is confined to a single day of symbolic support. Too often, brands speak loudly on 8th March, yet remain silent across the other 364 days as structural inequality persists.

Yet the day does serve a purpose. It creates a moment to reflect. And reflection matters, because meaningful progress requires an honest assessment of both how far we have come and where structural barriers still constrain opportunity.

In technology, that dual reality is particularly clear.

Progress made

Some of the gains are measurable. Women accounted for 58 percent of higher education completions in 2022, and female labour force participation reached 62.4 percent in January 2024, steadily rising over the past two decades. 

More women are founding companies, joining accelerator programs, and building products designed for global markets.

And, from where I'm sitting, the pipeline of female talent entering technology is increasingly broader, better educated, and more commercially ambitious.

Australia has also produced visible examples of female leadership across venture capital, fintech, software, and deep technology. Founders such as Barb Swanson, whose company Done Life is addressing challenges that disproportionately affect women, and Dr. Ariella Heffernan-Marks of Ovum, winner of the 2025 Australian Technologies Competition, demonstrate how female entrepreneurs are building globally relevant solutions while expanding the scope of problems technology chooses to solve.

That visibility matters, because it signals to the next generation of women that leadership in technology is attainable.

And it also didn't happen by accident, with legislative reform widening access to education and employment, advocacy networks that expanded visibility, and cultural expectations of leadership evolving through editorials just like this one.

Participation, representation, and visibility have improved.

But distribution still tells a different story, in three critical areas.

Progress required

Firstly, it's no secret that the gendered gap in capital allocation persists.

In 2024, startups with at least one female co-founder received 15 percent of total venture funding in Australia, while all-female teams attracted a measly 2-ish percent. 

As funding rounds increase in size, female representation tends to decline, meaning early participation does not consistently translate into capital at scale.

I believe this could be attributed to investment decision-making remaining concentrated within established networks, and later-stage funding favouring pattern recognition over performance data. 

Without structural change in how capital is assessed and deployed, disparities will compound at scale.

Secondly, ecosystem fragmentation means founders are often navigating disconnected accelerators, grant programs, investor networks, and corporate initiatives without coordination. 

For women who are already disproportionately time poor and operating outside traditional networks, the friction of inefficient discovery intensifies a pre-existing power imbalance.

And thirdly, data transparency continues to impede progress. 

Without comprehensive datasets tracking founder participation and capital flows, the moments where women are excluded from growth capital remain difficult to prove. Disparities can be rationalised rather than interrogated, and capital continues to circulate within established networks. When inequality is not measured, it is rarely corrected.

And it is precisely this gap in measurement that holds the key to the first and second points. 

Because when participation, progress, and capital flows are measurable - as well as the impediments to said factors - accountability strengthens and solutions emerge.

Only by knowing exactly what we're dealing with can we tear down the old tired models and rebuild our entire ecosystem infrastructure in a way that integrates inclusion from the ground up. 

Encouragingly, national coordination models are emerging that connect founders across stages and geographies, supported by verified data rather than informal networks alone. 

The Founders Union, for example, operates one of the largest verified datasets of Australian technology founders and draws on the most complete dataset of female founders in the country - over 6,000 women! - to inform inclusion pathways and partner visibility.

These pathways will be based on fact and lived experience, not guesswork or a once-a-year CSR exercise.

So let's use International Women's Day to trigger the beginnings of structural and measurable change that lasts for all 365 days of the year, not just one.

Because if the technology sector is serious about expanding participation, it must focus less on symbolic visibility and more on structural reform relating to capital allocation, ecosystem coordination, and data transparency system design.

When those systems are designed well, opportunity scales. When they are not, inequality simply compounds.