5 Barriers Women Founders Still Face
& How to Address Them
Published: 28/08/2025
Over the past decade, conversations around women in business have gained visibility. We see more female founders at pitch nights, more women entering accelerators, and more role models on stage at conferences.
And yet, when you peel back the surface, the data tells a different story. Women still receive a fraction of the funding that men do. They still face stereotypes when pitching, often balancing businesses with disproportionate caregiving responsibilities. And many tell us the same thing: “I feel like I’m building this alone.”
At Soreya, we’ve spoken with women founders who are just starting, and others who are years into their journey. Despite differences in industry, age, or stage, their challenges echo one another. Below, we explore five barriers that women founders still face today and what it will take to move past them.
1. Limited Access to Capital
The challenge: Capital is the fuel that allows ideas to scale. Yet women-led startups consistently receive less than 2% of global venture capital funding. In Australia, the figures are similarly bleak. This isn’t because women-led businesses underperform, in fact, research shows they often generate higher returns per dollar invested. Instead, unconscious bias and “pattern-matching” from investors reinforce a cycle where funding flows to the same types of founders over and over again.
Why it matters: Without access to growth capital, many women founders are forced to bootstrap longer, move more slowly, or step back from opportunities their male counterparts can seize. The result isn’t just unfair, it’s economically inefficient. It means fewer innovative solutions, fewer jobs created, and fewer role models visible to the next generation.
Path forward: Breaking this barrier requires a dual approach: investors broadening their lens and women founders being supported with alternative routes. Angel networks, gender-lens investing, government grants, and crowdfunding can play an immediate role. But systemic change comes when the investment community begins valuing diverse leadership as an advantage, not a risk.
2. The Mentorship and Sponsorship Gap
The challenge: Men are statistically more likely to find mentors and sponsors in senior positions. For women, mentorship is often unstructured, luck-based, or absent altogether. Many female founders describe struggling to find someone who understands both their industry and the unique challenges they face as women.
Why it matters: Mentorship and sponsorship don’t just provide advice. They open doors, accelerate decision-making, and offer credibility in rooms where women may otherwise be overlooked. Without these support structures, women founders often feel like they’re “re-inventing the wheel” in isolation.
Path forward: Structured mentorship is one of the most powerful tools we can create. At Soreya, we believe every founder deserves access to someone who has walked the path before – not just to answer tactical questions, but to offer reassurance that challenges can be overcome. Sponsorship, too, is critical: mentors who are willing to advocate for women in rooms they are not yet in.
3. Balancing Entrepreneurship and Care Responsibilities
The challenge: Entrepreneurship is often glamorized as “all in” – late nights, endless hustle, total immersion. But for many women, this image collides with another reality: being primary caregivers at home. Juggling two full-time roles leads to higher levels of stress, burnout, and sometimes the heartbreaking decision to scale back ambitions.
Why it matters: When women step back due to unsustainable pressures, society loses potential innovations and businesses that could have created impact. The myth that “real founders don’t sleep” actively harms not just individuals but entire industries.
Path forward: We need to redefine what successful entrepreneurship looks like. Success doesn’t have to mean 80-hour weeks or sacrificing wellbeing. Flexible models, family-friendly work cultures, and communities that validate balance as strength, not weakness, are essential. Peer circles are especially powerful here: reminding women they are not alone, and offering practical support in navigating the dual responsibilities of business and life.
4. Limited Access to High-Value Networks
The challenge: Many of the most powerful business connections are made in informal networks – golf courses, private dinners, or boys’ club environments. Women founders often find themselves excluded, either overtly or subtly. This exclusion limits introductions to investors, strategic partners, and senior advisors.
Why it matters: Connections are currency in business. A warm introduction to the right investor can change the trajectory of a company. Being locked out of these spaces perpetuates inequality, not because women lack talent, but because they lack access.
Path forward: Building alternative networks is not a “nice to have” – it is essential infrastructure. Women need spaces that are intentional about inclusion, where introductions flow freely and collaboration replaces competition. Communities like Soreya exist to make those high-value connections accessible and to reimagine what powerful networks look like when designed for women, not around them.
5. Bias and Stereotypes in Evaluation
The challenge: Gender bias continues to influence how women entrepreneurs are perceived. A Harvard Business Review study found that men are more likely to be asked about growth potential during pitches, while women are asked about risk mitigation, subtly shaping how their ventures are valued. Women leaders are also frequently judged through a double standard: too soft or too harsh, too cautious or too aggressive.
Why it matters: These biases don’t just affect confidence, they affect outcomes. When women are evaluated differently, they receive less funding, fewer opportunities, and more scrutiny, which can limit growth and discourage persistence.
Path forward: Representation is a powerful antidote. The more women who are visible as founders, investors, and leaders, the more we reshape the narrative of what leadership “looks like.” At the same time, allies, from investors to policymakers, must be conscious of how bias creeps into evaluation. Change requires not only women pushing forward but also institutions dismantling barriers from within.
Moving Forward
The barriers are clear, but so is the opportunity. The future of entrepreneurship depends on building systems that are inclusive by design, not by exception. This is not a women’s issue, it is an economic and societal one.
Breaking these barriers is not the responsibility of women alone. Investors, policymakers, institutions, and allies all have a role to play. When we invest in women founders, we don’t just advance equality, we unlock innovation, create jobs, and strengthen economies.
The question isn’t whether these barriers can be broken. The question is whether we will choose to break them together.
At Soreya, that choice is clear. We are here to champion ambitious women, to build structures of mentorship and support, and to prove that when women founders thrive, the world of business and the world at large, is stronger for it.
If you want to join our movement and be part of creating meaningful change for women founders, join our waitlist here to be the first to know when we launch and gain early access to support and opportunities.