A new therapeutic can take a decade. Often hundreds of millions of dollars. Regulators checking the work at every stage along the way. So when a category of founders consistently delivers better returns on less capital, you’d expect investment patterns to reflect that. Instead, women-led biotech companies remain stubbornly underfunded — even as the evidence for backing them keeps piling up.
What the Numbers Actually Show
The most-cited data point here comes from a 2018 Boston Consulting Group and MassChallenge study, and it’s worth being precise about what it found. Companies founded or co-founded by women received less than half the funding of male-founded companies. They still outperformed.
➤ Cumulative revenue over five years: $730K (women-led) vs. $662K (male-led) — a 10% gap in the other direction ➤ Revenue per dollar invested: 78¢ (women-led) vs. 31¢ (male-led) — more than double ➤ Funding received: less than half, for the better result
That is the irony: this is the kind of capital efficiency investors claim they want, but it is often too small for the funds that should care.
While the BCG study examined startups across multiple industries, more recent biotech-specific data suggest the pattern may be even more pronounced in life sciences. Funding has become more selective across biotech generally, yet women-founded biopharma companies continue to experience disproportionately steep declines in venture investment.
Why the Gap Persists
Some of this comes down to who’s in the room making decisions. Those numbers haven’t moved much either: roughly 92% of partners at major U.S. venture firms are men, and nearly three-quarters of U.S. VC firms have no female investing partner at all.
But the gap isn’t only about headcount. Research covered by Reuters found that male entrepreneurs are typically asked about growth and opportunity during pitch meetings, while female entrepreneurs face more questions about risk and what could go wrong. Ask someone to defend against worst-case scenarios for twenty minutes, and you’ve shaped the entire tone of the conversation before a term sheet ever comes up.
As an investor, I’ve built my thesis around exactly the kind of company this data describes: overlooked mechanisms, disciplined capital management, teams that don’t need a growth-at-all-costs pitch to prove the science works. That is not a coincidence. It is the filter I use: clear unmet need, disciplined development path, and a real reason the company should exist.
None of this is necessarily deliberate. Most investors are chasing the best deal in the room, not trying to exclude anyone. But pattern recognition — the thing that makes an experienced investor good at their job — also means leaning on what’s worked before. When the historical pattern is mostly male founders, that instinct quietly narrows who gets a fair hearing, independent of the science or the business case in front of them.
The Stakes Are Higher in Biotech Specifically
A consumer app that fails to get funded is a missed business opportunity. A therapeutic that fails to get funded is a treatment that never reaches the patients who need it.
Biotech doesn’t reward fast customer growth the way other startup categories do. It rewards scientific rigor, regulatory navigation, and the discipline to manage capital across a much longer runway. Those are exactly the strengths the data above suggests women-led teams tend to bring. Underfunding this group isn’t just a fairness problem — it’s a pipeline problem. And the therapeutic areas most likely to lose out — oncology, rare disease, women’s health — are often the ones with the least redundancy already.
Women’s health is a useful example of how this plays out in practice. Venture funding into the category did rise to $2.6B in 2024, up from $1.7B the year before, with biopharma making up roughly a third of that total. That’s real momentum. It’s also coming off a base so low that “growing” and “still underfunded relative to disease burden” can both be true at the same time.
What’s Starting to Shift
There are encouraging signs the landscape is beginning to change. More funds are weighing capital efficiency and milestone discipline alongside the traditional growth-at-all-costs pitch — a shift that favors exactly the kind of founder this data describes. More women are also moving into senior roles across biotech, venture capital, and pharma, which compounds over time: more mentors, more references, more investors who’ve already seen this pattern play out successfully and are willing to back it again.
Whether that’s enough to close a gap this size is the real question.
Where This Leaves Investors
As both a biotech founder and investor, I believe capital should follow performance, not convention. The data are not a plea for representation; they are a case for superior capital allocation.
These companies have demonstrated the fundamentals investors claim to prize: revenue efficiency, disciplined capital deployment, and outcomes that outperform the level of funding they received. In other words, the inefficiency is not in the companies — it is in the market’s allocation of capital.
For funds whose mandate is to identify mis-priced opportunities before consensus forms, this should be an obvious signal. The evidence has been visible for years. The question is no longer whether these founders can execute; it is why sophisticated capital continues to overlook an asset class hiding in plain sight.
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