Women-owned businesses closed nearly half the small-business loan gap with men-owned businesses in 2024, Biz2Credit's Women-Owned Business Study found in March 2025. Women-founded startups, meanwhile, took 27.7 percent of U.S. venture capital deal value in 2025 — the first year that share topped 25 percent — per PitchBook data in Female Founders Fund's 2025 funding review. The two markets are moving at very different speeds.
How much did the small-business lending gap close in 2024?
Women-owned businesses were approved for external financing at a 36 percent rate in 2024, up from 35 percent in 2023, compared with 29 percent for male-owned businesses, down from 30 percent, according to Biz2Credit's Women-Owned Business Study, an analysis of more than 53,000 commercial funding applications processed through the company's platform, published in March 2025. Approval rates were not where the gap showed up. The dollar amounts were.
The average loan approved for a women-owned business reached $67,035 in 2024, a 25 percent jump from $53,678 the year before. Male-owned businesses averaged $80,140, up 7 percent from $75,045. That left women-owned businesses receiving loans averaging about 20 percent less than male-owned businesses, down from a roughly 40 percent gap in prior years, per the same study.
| Metric, 2024 | Women-owned | Men-owned |
|---|---|---|
| Funding approval rate | 36% | 29% |
| Average loan amount | $67,035 | $80,140 |
| Average annual revenue | $519,886 | $743,643 |
| Average credit score | 653 | 670 |
Revenue moved in a similar direction: women-owned businesses in the study averaged $519,886 in annual revenue, up 15 percent year over year, against $743,643 for male-owned businesses, up 8 percent. The revenue gap remains large in dollar terms even as the growth rate favors women-owned firms. Average credit scores were close — 653 for women business owners versus 670 for men — each up ten points from 2023.
The businesses behind those numbers were also younger, on average. Women-owned businesses in the study were about 72 months old, versus roughly 86 months for male-owned businesses, and operating expenses rose faster for women-owned firms — up 38 percent year over year to $503,426, against a 31 percent increase to $711,670 for male-owned firms. Biz2Credit attributed the narrowing loan-amount gap to strengthening credit profiles and revenue growth among women-owned applicants rather than to any change in underwriting standards.
What did federal lending programs contribute?
Government-backed lending is a separate channel from private commercial loans, and it grew over the same period. The U.S. Small Business Administration said SBA-backed 7(a) and 504 loans to women-owned businesses reached $5.1 billion in fiscal year 2023, with women's share of total SBA lending rising from 15.6 percent to about 21.3 percent over the prior four years, according to a March 2024 post on the agency's website. The figure covers fiscal 2023, the most recent breakdown the agency had published by the time of this reporting, and reflects loan volume under programs administered during that period rather than a private lender's underwriting decisions.
Why has venture funding for women founders moved so much less?
Equity financing tells a different story than small-business lending. Female-founded companies raised $73.6 billion across 3,219 deals in 2025, reaching 27.7 percent of total U.S. venture deal value and 24.1 percent of deal count, both records, according to PitchBook data compiled in Female Founders Fund's 2025 review of funding for female founders, published in March 2026. But the total leaned heavily on two companies: Anthropic, co-founded by Daniela Amodei, and Scale AI, co-founded by Lucy Guo, whose combined rounds accounted for more than 40 percent of the year's dollars, or roughly $30 billion. AI-related deals made up about two-thirds of all venture dollars raised by women-founded startups in 2025, per the same review.
Exit activity for women-founded companies also grew: 349 exits in 2025, up from 290 in 2024, with exit value rising from $20.1 billion to $51.1 billion. Twenty new companies founded by women reached unicorn status during the year, and the aggregate valuation of women-founded unicorns hit a record $481 billion, per the review. Deal activity concentrated geographically as much as it did by sector: the Bay Area accounted for 742 deals worth $52.5 billion, and New York for 426 deals worth $8.1 billion, together representing most of the year's total dollar volume.
What does the split between debt and equity financing mean for founders?
The two markets measure different things and serve different founders. Small-business loans mostly finance existing, revenue-generating operations, the kind of company most women-owned businesses in the Biz2Credit study run. Venture capital finances high-growth startups aiming to scale fast, and it remains far more concentrated. A record dollar total driven by two AI mega-rounds is not the same as a broader pipeline: outside the Bay Area and New York, deal count for women-founded startups fell 5.4 percent year over year on the West Coast and 13 percent in the Mid-Atlantic, according to the PitchBook-sourced review.
Read together, the two data sets describe the same underlying pattern from opposite directions. Debt financing, where approval depends on revenue history and credit, narrowed for women-owned businesses in 2024. Equity financing, where a handful of large checks can move an entire year's total, still depends on a small number of outsized deals to reach its headline numbers. Both are real. Neither predicts the other.
Neither data set is a forecast, and neither is personalized advice about which financing path fits a given business. A revenue-generating small business and a venture-backed startup are answering different questions with different capital, and the sources tracking each — a commercial lending platform's own applicant pool in one case, deal-by-deal venture data in the other — measure different populations of founders. What the two reports agree on is direction: the gap in who gets financed is narrowing where financing depends on an existing track record, and it is narrowing more slowly, and less evenly, where it depends on a handful of very large bets.
For a related business news perspective, read How women-owned firms get certified for federal contracts under the 5 percent goal.
For more context, read The 2 percent problem: women founders and venture funding.