Allie Burns, Village Capital CEO, and Shruti Chandrasekhar, head of Startup Catalyst and SME Ventures at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), break down new research on accelerators' role in the gender financing gap in a Fast Company op-ed:
"What if we told you that a widely used intervention to help startups raise financing–accelerators–is actually making the gender financing gap worse?
...Accelerators seem to have no positive impact on the ability of female founders to raise equity which is the type of financing that is generally well-suited to accelerate the scale of high-growth startups. Male founders, on the other hand, seem to reap the benefits of acceleration, increasing the amount of equity they raise by 2.6 times as much as startups with a female founder."
Additional coverage:
