Startup sexism: why won't investors give women business loans?

Five years after its creation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is shifting its attention from its core areas of focus – mortgages, student loans and other products sold directly to individual consumers – to an issue that for many Americans is equally important but that so far has not been tackled head-on.

How can women get a loan to launch a small business?

It sounds a straightforward question, doesn’t it? Surely it’s just a matter of marching into your bank, filling out the forms, supplying a business plan and all the necessary documentation and waiting for a response.

Too often, though, that answer is likely to be “no”. And it is entirely possible that gender may be the reason for such a rejection.

Two years ago, a report by Democratic staffers of the Senate small business and entrepreneurship committee finally managed to nail down some numbers. While women owned 30% of US businesses, they calculated, for every dollar of conventional small business loans that they received, another $23 went to men. That juxtaposition, the staffers argued, didn’t make sense. If so many women were running so many businesses so successfully, why did so few qualify for loans?

That funding gap is important for the US economy since, according to a recent survey commissioned by American Express Open, female-owned businesses not only employ 9 million people and generate $1.6tn a year in revenue, but they are growing at five times the national average. Since 2007, more than 1,000 female-owned businesses have opened their doors every day and their hiring has grown consistently, even when that of male-owned small businesses has flagged.

If women can’t get access to capital, then those benefits will be capped.

There are plenty of valid reasons why women might not qualify for loans. The business proposals might not be robust enough. Their credit scores might not be high enough. But one study, published by the Institute of Government & Public Affairs and based on an analysis of lending in Chicago, found that even after adjusting the data to take into account factors like creditworthiness, gender has a dramatic impact on both access to loans and the size of the credit line a bank will grant to a small business owner. Not surprisingly, so does race.

Hence the CFPB’s tentative foray into cracking down on discrimination in small business lending. The agency already requires banks to collect and provide data on the gender, race and ethnicity of applicants for mortgages. Now it will ask lenders to do the same for anyone applying for a commercial loan.

This is covered under Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act, and while the CFPB has been slow to get moving on the issue, in April it recruited a former Small Business Administration official, Grady Hedgespeth, to oversee the move.

Getting solid data – as opposed to the results of surveys like those conducted for American Express and the Senate committee staffers – will be a step in the right direction. But what follows from that?

There are some indications that being denied funding has less to do with the content of your business plan and more to do with who you are, and sometimes what you look like.

Consider a series of studies conducted by scholars at Harvard Business School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Sloan School of Management, designed to figure out what kind of investment pitches from entrepreneurs are most successful in wooing “angel” investors. It turns out that backers of startup companies prefer to invest their money with attractive men than any women, whether attractive or not – even if the content of the business proposals is identical.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that women aren’t just at a disadvantage in the universe of bank lending, but in the venture capital universe, where less than 7% of all venture capital funds are allocated to companies founded by women. The Silicon Valley “bros” fund guys who look like them.

One anonymous female entrepreneur went public with the advice she received, to hire “a nerdy looking dude to represent your company publicly. You know, to make up for your looks”. (Even then, women don’t always stay at the helm of the companies they launch – Zipcar’s two founders are an example.)

It’s all a vicious circle. Venture capital firms tend to recruit partners from the ranks of successful CEOs. So the fewer women who get funding and launch startups, the smaller the pool of candidates becomes.

And yet Vivek Wadhwa, a noted Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has pointed to a list of findings that should challenge the perception that women aren’t worth backing. They run businesses in a more capital-efficient manner; their startups fail less frequently; they have higher revenues; and organizations that include more women have higher returns on equity.

There are some pinpoints of light here that should be encouraged.

First of all, if you have a pension fund that invests in venture capital, encourage it to take a look at some of the new female-run venture capital funds. Their founders will be just as tough when it comes to evaluating a business plan, but likely won’t don the same kind of gender blinkers. The more capital they have at their disposal to put to work, the more the imbalance in funding can be redressed.

Secondly, advocate for the CFPB and its efforts. The banks will soon begin pushing back – yet again – against the agency’s attempt to collect this data, worried that it will bring with it a bunch of lawsuits about “pinklining”. So what? If banks have been mis-selling products to women, especially poorer women or women of color, based on their gender, they need to be held accountable. And the agency needs to have the budget to do its work properly.

Thirdly, support educational efforts under way locally and nationally that ensure that women are able to take advantage of opportunities that do exist to borrow, when they have a great business idea and the market timing is right. Grameen America, for example, doesn’t just offer microloans. It works with low-income women to help them build savings and credit scores.

Finally, keep an eye on the crowdfunding world. While this can be a bit of a perilous area for inexperienced investors, it also can be a boon for small business owners seeking startup capital who have been turned down for more conventional loans.

One early study of Kickstarter projects (from 2009 to 2012) found that 69.5% of those posted by women were likely to be funded, while only 61.4% of men’s business plans got funding. A second survey, published in 2014, replicated those findings, and found the results were particularly striking for technology companies: 65% of companies and projects posted by women were funded, compared to only 30% for men.

Crowdfunding isn’t a panacea, however. While the number of deals and their dollar value is growing, it doesn’t have the capacity to fill up what the big commercial banks could do.

It has been 28 years since Ronald Reagan signed the Women’s Business Ownership Act, legislation that for the first time made it illegal for states to pass laws requiring women to have a man cosign a business loan. It’s time to ensure that women can take full advantage of the opportunities it should have created, and banish the more subtle forms of discrimination that endure.