Life
Awesome New Funding Opportunity For Women
Women face a wide variety of structural disadvantages in our society — including the fact that women often have a harder time getting start-up capital for business ventures, especially in the tech industry. But, looking to even things out a little more, Indiegogo is launching an initiative to support women entrepreneurs. And they have a lot of kickass partners, inlcuding Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network, Girls In Tech UK, Girls in Tech US, Blooming Founders, Trep Life, and Lipstick & Politics. So this should be pretty awesome.
When it comes to funding in the world of tech, the conventional source of revenue for a new business is venture capital funding. However, research indicates that women-led businesses consistently receive less funding than their male-led counterparts — which might not be surprising, given that women are also massively underrepresented among venture capitalists. However, women have found success with crowdfunding initiatives; in fact, research suggests that women are more successful with crowdfunding than men are.
However, crowdfunding is still a more precarious form of fundraising, so having a crowdfunding site like Indiegogo pledge to help support female entrepreneurs further is a pretty awesome step.
Indiegogo co-founder Danae Ringelmann told The Daily Dot that trying to navigate funding is tricky for people from marginalized groups. "It’s always hard to know if there's a specific situation that didn’t pan out because of your gender," Ringelmann said. "What you don’t want to do as a woman or as a person of color is carry that suspicious filter with you all the time — because it can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy — but you also don’t want to ignore that there are biases out there."
In that climate, she thinks that Indiegogo can be a great place for women to turn. She says that successful Indiegogo projects tend to focus less on profits, and more on passion and community, and they let more altruistic motives shine through. And she suspects women are more prone to adopt the kind of inclusive, positive approach that gets results on a crowdfunding site.
So to make Indiegogo and an even better place for female entrepreneurs and to give women even more opportunity as they launch new business ventures, Indiegogo will be developing a program that will include things like mentoring and networking opportunities to help boost projects.
Here's hoping it all goes swimmingly.
