Lucy Chow has spent years watching the region’s start-up scene mature. The UAE-based investor and author has seen new funds launched, more founders pitching and governments speaking the language of entrepreneurship. But for women trying to raise capital in the Middle East, she says one problem has proved stubborn.
“We are not always invited into the rooms where decision-making happens,” Chow said in a recent interview with AIBC. “That is still primarily male-dominated, and unless women get access and an entry point, it is really hard for them even to be asked to write their first cheque.”
Her point is not merely anecdotal. A new report by the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private sector arm, finds that women remain sharply underrepresented in emerging market private equity and venture capital. In a dataset covering about 170 funds and 2,000 portfolio companies, women accounted for 30 per cent of investment staff but only 12 per cent of partners.
The imbalance matters because partners decide where capital goes. Chow argues that the exclusion is felt on both sides of the table: women are less likely to become investors, and female founders are less likely to meet people who can fund them.
“For female founders specifically, that is really hard,” she said. “They are not networking in the right rooms, because they need to be networking with people who are actually writing the cheques, and those are typically men.”
For start-ups, early money can decide whether an idea reaches the market at all. Chow said women founders face “hurdles” that are higher than those faced by male counterparts. “If we do not get funding at the beginning, you never scale,” she said. “That is delaying the go-to-market strategy for female founders, it is delaying funding, and sometimes their idea never gets to market.”
The IFC report supports that concern. It found that companies founded, owned or led by women represented only 19 per cent of businesses backed by the private equity and venture capital funds in its sample, and received only 13 per cent of the capital. The average women-owned, founded or led company received $8.7m, compared with $13.3m for other companies. Even after adjusting for factors such as company size, sector and region, the report found a remaining financing gap of 13 per cent.
The report says the gap may partly reflect differences in company size, sector, growth profile and financing type, while also citing experimental evidence that investors can favour pitches presented by men over identical pitches presented by women.
For Chow, the commercial case is plain. Women founders, she said, are often building around tangible needs. “There is usually some sort of pain point, and then they come up with a business that solves these problems.”
She sees particular momentum in climate tech, health tech, gaming and esports. Femtech and longevity, she added, are becoming prominent in the Middle East and North Africa, helped by rising attention to health, wellbeing and consumer needs.
The IFC’s findings suggest that who sits around the investment table changes what gets funded. Funds with women making up 30 per cent to 70 per cent of partners allocated an average of 17 per cent of their portfolios to women-owned or women-founded companies, compared with 9 per cent for funds without that balance. In venture capital, the difference was larger: 29 per cent compared with 17 per cent.
The report concludes: the industry is leaving opportunities unseen when investment committees remain overwhelmingly male.
Chow wants practical intervention, not slogans. She said governments could help “de-risk the initial stage” of investing, through grants or public funding that invests alongside women. “This will make women less hesitant to write their first cheque,” she said.
Once that first cheque is written, she believes confidence builds. “Then maybe they will become a limited partner in a fund, and maybe one day they can start their own funds.”
The report points in the same direction: change has to reach senior roles, not just entry-level hiring. Aline W Esteves, a partner at Monashees+, says, quite plainly, in the IFC report: “Gender balance at the leadership level doesn’t just naturally happen, it requires intentional action.”
For Lucy Chow, that intentional action means women should not be confined to advisory roles. “We still need to find a way to make sure that there are more women general partners, there are more women sitting on investment committees,” she said. “Not just as advisers, but as actual contributors, movers and decision-makers in funds.”
The question, for Chow, is not whether women can build companies, but whether they can access the capital needed to build them at scale.
