UnternehmenWarum gründen Frauen seltener?

One in three. That's roughly the share of new German businesses founded by a woman. If you narrow it to capital-intensive start-ups — the ventures that grow fast, attract investors, and reshape industries — that share drops to just one in six. Claudia Gather and Ingrid Biermann don't spend time debating whether that gap exists. They take it as given and ask something harder: what structural forces produce it? In 2020, Germany saw five hundred thirty-seven thousand new companies founded, of which about forty-seven thousand qualified as start-ups. Women were involved in thirty-eight percent of all founding activity but only sixteen percent of start-up foundings. That's not a small discrepancy. Gather and Biermann argue it cannot be explained by motivation or ambition alone. The causes run deeper — through education, money, and institutional design. Start with the pipeline. A key mechanism here is occupational segregation — the tendency for men and women to cluster in different fields of study and work, fields that carry very different rates of self-employment. Women are overrepresented in areas where founding is rare: only two percent of women who trained in nursing become self-employed, and four percent of those in education and social work. Men are overrepresented in the technical and commercial fields that feed start-ups. So by the time you reach the founding stage, the pool of likely founders is already skewed. The gap begins well before anyone writes a business plan. Then there's capital. Women who do found businesses take up external financing less often, relying instead on savings or privately borrowed money. Many launch small, part-time, service-sector ventures — partly by choice, but partly because certain funding programs exclude them by design, requiring full-time commitment or focusing narrowly on technology innovations. The social safety net makes the stakes even higher. Gather and Biermann document that self-employed women still don't receive maternity pay under Germany's two thousand eighteen maternity protection rules. Health insurance for the self-employed only became mandatory in two thousand seven. When a business slows down after a birth, costs continue and contracts evaporate. Women name this insecurity directly as a reason not to found — or to stop. Networks compound all of this. The entrepreneurial world still projects a male image, and very few all-female founding teams access venture capital. This creates a feedback loop: fewer visible female founders means fewer women who see founding as a realistic path for someone like them. The policy prescriptions follow the diagnosis. Reform social security for the self-employed — the paper points to Germany's Künstlersozialkasse, a solidarity fund for freelance artists, as a model worth examining. Redesign funding programs so they don't exclude part-time founders or social innovations. Improve access to external finance. Build networks among women founders. Each structural barrier identified has a structural fix available. When women are thirty-eight percent of founders overall but only sixteen percent of start-up founders, the loss isn't just one of fairness. It's a forfeiture of innovation, growth, and economic dynamism that the whole society absorbs. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.