Funding Strategy Review

The funding gap is not
a pipeline problem.
It is a structural one.

A decade of gender lens overlays. More women at the table. The numbers are getting worse. The structure underneath the commitment has not changed — and that is a capital efficiency problem, not a diversity one.

The Performance Case

This is not a diversity argument. It is a capital efficiency argument.

22.5%
Average IRR for UK venture capital funds since 2014. Funds with gender-balanced investment committees generate 10–20% higher returns than majority-male equivalents.
10% → +1.5%
A 10% increase in female investing partners is associated with 1.5% higher fund returns and 9.7% more profitable exits.

The performance gap is not structural aspiration. It is empirical.

The source of the underperformance is identifiable.

13%
Of commercially viable deal flow never reaches your Investment Committee — eliminated at the sourcing, screening, and assessment gates before the investment decision is made.
1.90 / 5
IWC signatories rate structural fund redesign at 1.90 out of 5 — the lowest of all 14 actions. Commitment is visible. Structural change is not happening.
The variable is not the founder. It is the structure they are being assessed against.
The Structural Problem

What's underneath.

The intent has always been there. Foundations have updated their grant strategies. Impact investors have built gender-informed investment theses. Corporate philanthropic arms have restructured their social impact programmes. The commitment is real.

And still the numbers move in the wrong direction.

Because the problem is not at the surface. It runs through the entire model.

The criteria women-led businesses are assessed against assume a level of maturity many have not yet reached — not because the businesses are not strong, but because women founders have historically had access to less early-stage capital to build with. The model then compounds this by deploying funding in ways that do not match where these businesses actually are: large, infrequent grants where smaller amounts offered more regularly — evolving into lending products, evolving into equity when defined milestones are met — would reach far more of the women the funding was designed for.

Adjusting language, adding diversity criteria, or increasing female representation on panels does not reach any of this. It cannot — because the problem is in the structure, not the surface.

The women being filtered out are not underfundable. They are being measured against a framework that was not designed with their growth trajectory in mind.
Lisa Erhart, Founder of Funding4Growth
Both Sides of the Table

The perspective
that changes
everything.

Analyst supporting multiple global sustainability funds, 2010–2012 — working within the capital allocation infrastructure that preceded ESG standardisation.
Has reviewed capital allocation programmes from the assessor side, with direct experience of where structural design fails before capital reaches founders.
Developed the Capital Leakage Diagnostic and the five-filter-point framework from IWC empirical data and UK private capital pipeline research.
Founder of Funding4Growth. Background in corporate technology transformation and sustainability consultancy.
The Funding Strategy Review

Stop. Examine.
Rebuild where
necessary.

The Funding Strategy Review is a structured audit of your existing funding strategy, investment thesis or grant programme — examined honestly against what you intend it to do.

Over four to six weeks, it maps your eligibility criteria, application process, assessment framework and decision-making structure. The purpose is not to apply another overlay. It is to identify precisely what is working, what is failing, and what needs to be rebuilt — specific to your organisation, not a generic set of diversity recommendations.

You receive a clear report: a structural gap analysis, prioritised findings, and a grounded starting point for redesign.

Available as a standalone engagement or as the opening phase of a complete structural reform programme.
Eligibility Criteria
Are your criteria calibrated to where women-led businesses actually are in their growth trajectory — or where you assume they should be?
Application Process
Does the format, evidence requirements and timeline work for the founders you are trying to reach?
Assessment Framework
How is risk being read within your scoring? What assumptions are embedded — and whose business model do they reflect?
Decision-Making Structure
Where does the process compound structural disadvantage at the final stage — and what would change if it didn't?
Funding Strategy Review

If your fund is committed to reaching women-led businesses — and the capital efficiency, outcomes, or LP reporting are not yet reflecting that commitment — the structure is worth an honest examination.

Book a Conversation with Lisa

30 minutes. No obligation. To establish whether a structural review is the right next step for your organisation.

The Evidence Base

The research
behind the position.

The case that the funding gap is a structural design problem — not a founder problem — is not a hypothesis. It is confirmed by three separate government-commissioned reports, corroborated by independent research, and visible in the data that funders themselves are generating through their own reporting obligations.

Part One

The macro context:
The Great Wealth Transfer

The largest intergenerational movement of assets in recorded history is already underway. Baby Boomer wealth — accumulated across decades of property price growth, superannuation expansion and sustained equity market returns — is beginning to transfer. The process is gradual, not a single event, and it is expected to peak somewhere between 2045 and 2050.

What makes this transfer structurally different from anything that has preceded it: women sit in the path of it. Women outlive men. The longevity differential, combined with the age gap in many Boomer-era marriages, means women inherit from partners before estates pass to the next generation — and then manage and deploy that wealth, often for decades, before it moves further down the line.

$124tn
Estimated global wealth transfer through to 2048
Cerulli Associates
$81tn
Women's global wealth as of 2023 — more than double the 2010 figure of $34 trillion
Boston Consulting Group
£5–7tn
UK wealth transfer to 2050. Women projected to control 60% of UK wealth through the transfer
Lubbock Fine / Brooks Macdonald
$3.2tn
Women in Australia set to inherit — 65% of the total transfer — within the next decade
JBWere / Productivity Commission

This growth is not driven by the transfer alone. Female millionaires in Australia are growing at 5.7% per year — almost double the 3.6% rate for men. Female entrepreneurs are growing three times faster than their male counterparts. The inherited wealth and the self-created wealth are converging simultaneously. That convergence is what makes this moment structurally significant.

The capital is moving toward women founders — both as funders and as builders. The structure it has to flow through has not caught up.
Part Two

The tension:
wealth moving, funding not following

More capital committed to women founders. More women sitting on investment committees. More organisations signing gender commitments. And the funding gap is widening, not closing.

1.3%
Equity investment to all-female founder teams in 2025 to date — down from 2.5% in 2023
Invest in Women Taskforce Annual Report 2025
0.8%
Global VC funding to female-only founders in 2025
Founders Forum / PitchBook
89%
Share of equity investment still going to all-male founding teams
IWT Annual Report 2025
13%
Could be added to UK equity market annually by funding viable female and ethnic minority-led businesses currently rejected for non-commercial reasons
IWC / British Business Bank 2024

The Invest in Women Taskforce has mobilised $635 million in capital. In the third quarter of 2025, investment to mixed-gender teams fell back to 12.6%. The taskforce's own report concluded: reallocation of capital needs to be deliberate if we want to see systemic change.

Capital supply is not the problem. The structural design of how it flows is.

The paradox: more women at the table, worse outcomes. In the UK, investment in female-led businesses dropped from 21.6% to 18.6% — despite women now comprising 34% of angel investors. More representation did not produce more funding. The structure underneath it did not change.
Part Three — IWC Research 2025

The self-assessment
gap

The Investing in Women Code has 290 signatories. Each commits annually to reviewing their internal practices against a defined set of 14 actions drawn from the British Business Bank's Finding What Works report. They self-assess. They self-report. There is no independent audit.

The data shows what signatories are rating themselves highly on — and what they are not doing. The gap between the two is exactly where the structural problem lives.

Providing constructive feedback on propositions
4.35 / 5
Encouraging cross-referrals to other funds
4.10 / 5
Increasing diversity among those identifying propositions
3.92 / 5
Communicating investment strategies via website and social media
3.83 / 5
Ensuring diverse senior decision makers and investment committees
3.79 / 5
Monitoring and reporting progress to limited partners
3.22 / 5
Using scouts to access diverse networks
2.57 / 5
Designing funds targeted specifically at diverse entrepreneurs
1.90 / 5

Signatories score themselves highly on visible, reportable surface actions. They score themselves near zero on structural redesign. The outcomes confirm this pattern entirely.

The warm introductions finding — the most direct evidence of structural failure. Warm inbound leads made up only 33% of pitch decks but constituted 73% of IC decisions and funded deals. All-male teams had the highest share of warm leads (41%). All-female teams had the highest reliance on cold inbound (44%). This is not a founder network problem. It is a structural access problem baked into how capital flows — and no amount of diverse hiring on the investment committee changes where the warm introductions come from.
Part Four — What Works

When the structure
is designed to reach them

The evidence of what works when programme design is calibrated to where women-led businesses actually are is unambiguous. These are not projections — they are outcomes from programmes that exist.

78% vs 35%
Queensland Ignite Ideas Fund: firms with at least one female founder generated revenue at more than double the rate of all-male-founded firms
4.2 : 1
Victoria Alice Anderson Fund: private sector co-investment ratio against an expected 3 to 1 — $7.1M activated $41.2M in follow-on capital
38%
CDFI business loans to women-led businesses in 2024 — more than double women's representation in small business leadership
35%
Higher returns generated by teams with at least one female founder compared to all-male teams
Kauffman Fellows
What Is Changing
More women with capital to deploy
More women on allocating panels
More gender-explicit investment criteria
More impact mandates aligned with women-led businesses
Growing evidence that female-founded businesses deliver comparable or better returns
What Isn't Changing on Its Own
The structural design of how criteria filter applications
Evidence requirements calibrated to the wrong stage
Assessment frameworks that read risk through a single business model lens
Data systems that cannot see where women are dropping out of the pipeline
The variable is not the founder. It is the structure they are being assessed against.
The Approach

Not a DEI review.
A structural programme review.

The Funding Strategy Review applies a structured review methodology to examine whether your capital allocation programme is designed to produce the outcomes your organisation has committed to. It follows the same logic used in environmental and quality assessments: define the standard, assess current practice against it, identify gaps, redesign where necessary.

This is not a values exercise. The question at the centre of every engagement is straightforward — is the structure of your programme capable of reaching the founders you say you want to fund?

Lisa Erhart brings experience from both sides of the capital allocation process. She spent two years as an analyst supporting multiple global sustainability funds, working within the capital infrastructure that preceded ESG standardisation. She has reviewed funding programmes from the assessor side, with direct experience of where structural design fails before capital reaches founders. The review methodology follows from that operational knowledge.

The Framework

Five places women-led
ventures get filtered out

Every Funding Strategy Review maps the client's funding model against five structural filter points. These are the places where the design of a programme — regardless of intent — most commonly creates barriers for the founders it says it wants to reach.

Filter 01
Data Ingestion & Tracking
Whether demographic metadata is captured at the point of pipeline entry. Most programmes track allocation after leakage has already occurred, not as it happens.
Filter 02
Sourcing & Network Architecture
Whether deal flow relies on closed warm networks. Warm introductions constitute 73% of IC decisions despite representing 33% of inbound. All-female teams have the highest reliance on cold inbound — and the lowest pass rate.
Filter 03
Screening Pass-Rate
Whether initial screening uses objective, weighted rubrics or pattern-matching. For identical warm introductions, the pass rate is 67% for all-male teams and 46% for all-female teams. Cold inbound pass rate for all-female teams: 11%.
Filter 04
Assessment & Ticket Sizing
Whether due diligence and valuation apply consistent standards across teams. All-female teams receive median first-cheque sizes of £3.9M against £9.2M for all-male cohorts at identical stages.
Filter 05
IC Composition & Follow-On
Where 50% or more of an Investment Committee is female, 36% of funded deals go to female-founded teams. In homogeneous committees: 30%. Final-stage decision-making structure is the most direct lever available.
The Engagement

Five phases.
One deliverable each.

01
Entry Point
Baseline Diagnostic
Examines how your capital allocation programme operates in practice against your stated strategy and intended outcomes. Maps the five structural filter points and identifies where leakage is occurring.
Deliverable: Baseline Diagnostic Report — current-state assessment, leakage map, prioritised findings, initial recommendations
02
Follows Diagnostic
Strategy Redesign
Translates diagnostic findings into revised strategy and structural recommendations. Covers sourcing architecture, screening frameworks, assessment rubrics, and IC composition — specific to your programme, not a generic set of recommendations.
Deliverable: Strategy Redesign document with rationale for every change
03
Follows Redesign
Performance & Reporting Framework
Connects the revised strategy to measurable outcomes. Defines pipeline conversion metrics, gender-disaggregated data requirements, and the reporting structure needed for LP, board, and signatory reporting obligations.
Deliverable: Performance and Reporting Framework document
04
Follows Framework
Action Plan and Implementation Programme
A sequenced implementation plan with clear ownership. Covers immediate structural changes, medium-term programme redesign, and longer-term systemic shifts — with briefing recommendations for investment teams and assessment panels.
Deliverable: Implementation Roadmap with phased priorities, owners and timelines
05
Ongoing
Data Measurement and Milestone Reporting
Measurement and reporting framework tied to implementation milestones. Includes a dashboard template, data collection process recommendations, and a milestone reporting schedule.
Deliverable: Measurement Framework, Dashboard Template and Milestone Reporting Schedule
Who This Is For

The organisations
this serves

VC & PE
Venture capital and private equity funds
Your investment thesis is aligned. The question is whether your sourcing architecture, screening process, and IC structure are built to act on it.
Angel Networks
Angel investor networks and syndicates
Deal volume with diverse founders has grown. Total capital deployed has not kept pace. The structural reasons for that gap are addressable.
Debt Providers
Commercial banks and debt finance providers
Demand-side self-censorship is suppressing your addressable lending market. The design of your application and assessment process is a direct factor.
IWC Signatories
Investing in Women Code signatories
Signing the Code is a public commitment. This review tests whether the operational structure underneath it is producing the outcomes the commitment implies.
Engagement Outcomes

What you receive
at the end of the engagement

A structured assessment of your capital allocation programme against empirical benchmarks
Clear identification of where structural leakage is occurring across the five filter points
A prioritised roadmap for programme redesign
Revised strategy and assessment framework recommendations
Pipeline conversion tracking tools for ongoing review
A stronger basis for LP, board, and signatory reporting on capital efficiency
The recommended starting point is the Baseline Diagnostic. It is bounded and evidence-based. It gives the organisation a clear view of the current state before committing to broader redesign, implementation or measurement work. Following the diagnostic, Funding4Growth can support the organisation through the full redesign and implementation pathway as required.
Funding Strategy Review

If your fund is committed to reaching women-led businesses — and the capital efficiency, outcomes, or LP reporting are not yet reflecting that commitment — the structure is worth an honest examination.

Book a Conversation with Lisa

30 minutes. No obligation. To establish whether a structural review is the right next step for your organisation.