Despite government rhetoric about supporting female entrepreneurs, the early termination of its Boosting Female Founders (BFF) program highlights the fluidity of startup funding after a report found BFF “did not have a measurable impact” on Australia’s startup ecosystem.
That program – which was announced in 2018 and kicked off in 2020 amidst a flurry of industry and government efforts to increase the participation of women in Australia’s IT industry – remained a cornerstone of the government’s gendered support initiatives that were, then Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews said in introducing the program, “about creating opportunity for all.”
“The program aims to diversity the Australian startup landscape,” she said, “which will promote innovation, job creation and economic growth.”
“Greater access to early-stage capital for female entrepreneurs will help them to grow their startups and expand into domestic and global markets.”
Design consultation for the program saw 323 submissions and input from 380 people during focus groups and a webinar, canvassing stakeholders who highlighted three key challenges faced by women who wanted to establish startups in what was described as a “male system” of startup funding: access to funding and capital, access to supportive networks, and lack of confidence.
Respondents agreed that the best way to stimulate private investment in women-led startups would include funding and financial incentives, education and training opportunities, and facilitating networking opportunities – but after three years and three funding rounds that also included support for global growth, it seems that guidance has failed to deliver as expected.
Yet while it ultimately supported 123 majority female owned and female led startups with grants of between $25,000 and $400,000 – and helped more than 900 access mentoring and advice despite the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic – a Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) evaluation of the program, obtained under FOI by InnovationAus, found that “while [BFF] directly supported the businesses, it did not have a measurable impact on the wider startup ecosystem.”
BFF – which hit an embarrassing snag in 2021 after the department rescinded emails advising over 1,000 applicants that they had advanced to the next round – was originally slated to end next year, but will now be discontinued early having disbursed just $35.2 million of its originally allocated $52.2 million in funding.
Women founders push back
The receipt of $400,000 in BFF funding was “a game changer” for Brisbane based cloud and web development company ATech, whose founder Sarah-Jane Peterschlingmann previously told Information Age that the funding “will be the first time we’ve had an opportunity to properly invest in business growth.”
BFF is far from the only support program focused on supporting women led businesses – similar targeted programs such as Women in Rural, Regional and Remote Enterprises (WiRE), River City Labs’s Elevating Female Founders Program, LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund and LaunchVic-backed startup accelerator Atto have similar objectives – yet the withdrawal of government support for has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many industry players.
Entrepreneur advocate Amanda Rose, for one, called the “insulting” decision “bullshit”, telling SmartCompany that having government support gave many applicants the credibility to secure additional private sector funding.
Cutting BFF “is going to put women behind massively,” she said.
“Without that, all of them will go under.”
Female founders have flocked to BFF and other innovative programs that have helped women build businesses based on innovative ideas in fields such as blockchain, remote health, property technology, climate change, online retail, staff onboarding, and even endometriosis and cricket.
For its part, DISR – which administers over 600 grants and programs – continues to support startups through initiatives like its Industry Growth Program, a non-gendered funding mechanism that was launched in November and provides eligible startups and “innovative SMEs” with early stage grants of $50,000 to $250,000, and $100,000 to $5 million for commercialisation and growth projects.
The government also funds women-focused initiatives in STEM and entrepreneurship, and local programs such as the South Australia focused Fearless Innovators Grant, NSW’s Women in Business, Queensland based Women in Industry Grant Program, and Victoria’s recently closed Women of Colour Executive Leadership Program.
Priorities
Yet for all the value these programs bring, the premature discontinuation of BFF begs a simple question: is funding female entrepreneurship still, as now Shadow Minister for Women Sussan Ley previously called it, “an economic and social priority”?
Frameworks like the Women-inclusive return on investment (WI-ROI) framework have sought to quantify the benefit of such investment, while no less than UNICEF executive Kitty van der Heijden has argued that supporting female founders is “not just the right thing to do but is a smart investment decision,” with analyses suggesting companies with female founders generate 35 per cent higher ROI and 12 per cent higher revenues, on average, than those with male founders.
But after years of conscious equality initiatives, haven’t we reached a place where female entrepreneurs can be judged based on the value of their ideas rather than their gender?
Not yet, according to Graham & Walker Venture Fund managing director Leslie Feinzaig.
Feinzaig – who initially founded the organisation as the Female Founders Alliance – warns that “it’s disingenuous to say we’re all equal here [and] that we’re living and working in a post-gender society.”
“In fact,” she wrote, “the thing I learned by building the Female Founders Alliance is that the only space where I could truly just be a founder, and not a ‘female founder’, is one where I was surrounded by other female founders.”
