FPIM Chair Anniversary Symposium: A Candid View of Women in Entrepreneurship

The Federal Holding and Investment Company (SFPI-FPIM) and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB) kindly invite you to a symposium on gender, entrepreneurship and financing. Despite promising trends, women are still heavily underrepresented in the high-tech startup scene. Gender disparities persist, with women-led companies continuing to account for a small portion of deal flow and overall invested capital. Even more, the COVID-19 pandemic likely had a disproportionate impact on women’s economic situation. This makes gender smart investing and increasing female participation in innovative entrepreneurship a policy priority at the local, national and global level.

The symposium aims at bringing together scholars and practitioners to explore how research can effectively reach and influence practice to advance gender equity in high-growth entrepreneurship. Our intent is to highlight cutting-edge studies about gender in startup founding and funding and turn a critical eye toward current ideas about how to eradicate lasting gender inequalities. We analyze a number of recommendations — both financial and policy-related — that could help to accelerate the transition towards a more balanced and better functioning funding environment. Our hope is that having this conversation at KVAB will debunk in productive ways the structural inequities and persistent biases that women still face when it comes to creating and funding their businesses.