Funds forsake the females

THE numbers are in. South-East Asia’s venture markets are bouncing back. Female founders, not so much. And now a war nobody planned for is about to make things harder.

There is a particular kind of progress that looks good on paper until you read it carefully. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2025 offers one such moment.

Globally, 68.8% of the gender gap has now been closed. The fastest narrowing since the pandemic, shaving a full 11 years off previous projections. Encouraging, yes. But the fine print is sobering: parity is still 123 years away, and no single economy has achieved it.

For women in South-East Asia, that timeline stretches even further. Eastern Asia and the Pacific are projected to take 179 years to reach full parity.

One hundred and seventy-nine years. Let that sit.

And nowhere is this distance more visible, or more consequential, than in the flow of capital.

A new research report by OSK Ventures International on March 31, examining early-stage private market activity across South-East Asia from 2022 to mid-2025, has found that female-founded companies (FFCs) are being left behind by the very recovery they helped survive.

After the brutal venture contraction of 2022 to 2024, deal activity across SEA rebounded sharply in 2025, the total deal count rising approximately 51% year-on-year!

But FFCs did not ride that wave proportionally. Their share of total deals declined to approximately 18%, and their share of capital fell to around 12%, the lowest levels recorded across the entire period of analysis.

Yes, do read that again: the market recovered but women’s share of it SHRANK!

This is not a story about female founders failing. It is a story about where capital chooses to flow and the assumptions embedded in those choices.

The dominant engine of 2025’s early-stage momentum was, not surprisingly, in IT, supercharged by AI and machine learning transactions. Female-founded companies represented only around 5% of IT sector deals.

Meanwhile, FFC activity remains concentrated in healthcare, financial services, and consumer and retail, the sectors that are real, impactful, and increasingly capital-efficient, but those are not where the headline cheques are going.

There is something structurally self-reinforcing about this. Capital flows to familiar patterns. Familiar patterns have historically excluded women. And so, the gap compounds, quietly.

The OSK Ventures survey of female founders adds texture to what the numbers only partially capture. Founders rated their overall fundraising experience at 2.95 out of 5. They rated market inclusiveness even lower, at 2.72. And yet their five-year optimism scored 3.32.

A cautious, hard-earned hopefulness that speaks volumes about the character of women who build anyway. Delusional was the word someone used to describe the founders’ state of mind.

Thirty-six percent said they have never raised external capital (I suspect the number could be higher if the survey sampled a wider audience), whether by choice or because the friction of accessing aligned funding simply wasn’t worth the cost.

What strikes me most about this survey is what female founders are NOT asking for. They are not asking for easier standards, lower bars, or diversity, equity, and Iiclusion optics. One founder put it plainly: “Hold us to high standards, just make sure they’re the same standards applied to everyone else.”

Another framed FFC investing not as charity but as sound economics: “When women get equal access, the returns speak for themselves.”

And then the Strait of Hormuz closed. Whatever cautious momentum existed in South-East Asia’s early-stage markets now faces a new variable that nobody had priced in. Brent crude surged around 15% in the opening days of the conflict, then to US$120 a barrel as the market began pricing in the risk of sustained disruption.

South-East Asia, which is almost entirely dependent on Middle Eastern energy, is absorbing this shock in real time. Factories in the region’s export-dependent economies are shuttering or operating part-time. Tourism, which is critical to economies like Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore is being battered by high jet fuel costs and cancelled travel.

For venture markets, the consequences are not abstract. When a battlefield shock hardens into a geoeconomic one, insurance premiums rise, investment decisions are deferred, supply chains are rerouted, and trust in stability erodes.

The World Trade Organisation has warned that if oil and gas prices remain high for the rest of the year, it could reduce 2026 global gross domestic product growth forecast by 0.3%. In emerging markets already navigating post-pandemic debt and currency pressures, that is no small number.

The question for female founders in South-East Asia is a brutal one: when capital gets cautious, who does it desert first?

History provides an uncomfortable answer. During every recent major economic contraction, the 2008 financial crisis, Covid-19, the recovery of funding for female-founded companies has consistently lagged behind the overall rebound.

The OSK Ventures data already showed this pattern playing out in the 2022–2024 downturn, where even as total South-East Asia’s deal activity began recovering, women’s proportional share continued to fall.

An energy-driven inflation shock, the kind that squeezes consumer spending, raises operational costs, and spooks limited partner (LP) risk appetite, is likely to compress the early-stage funding environment further and compress it unevenly.

The founders the report surveyed are already building lean. I know I am. Thirty-six percent are profitable. Another 28% are near breakeven. These are not founders who need rescuing from financial discipline, they have been practising it by necessity for years. What they are most vulnerable to is not operational failure but investor retreat.

Smaller energy-importing economies across South-East Asia, including the Philippines, are already seeing inflation and exchange rate pressures transmit rapidly through their systems.

Malaysia, which ranked 108th on the WEF gender gap index and where FFC funding had just shown a promising uptick driven by financial services transactions, now faces exactly the macro headwinds that could freeze the larger cheques that were driving that progress.

This is the hidden tax of conflict on gender equity in capital markets. The network gaps that are harder to bridge, the risk appetite narrower, the bar imperceptibly higher for founders who were already being held to different standards.

The Economic Participation and Opportunity gender gap globally has only been closed by 61%, even as educational and health gaps approach near-parity.

The talent is there. The capability is there. The ambition, as every founder surveyed made clear, is absolutely there. What has always been scarce is access. And access is precisely what contracts when markets get scared.

So, what would a different response look like? The founders surveyed are clear: 29% point to greater representation of women in investment decision-making as the most effective lever. Twenty-six percent call for targeted funding programmes.

These are not radical asks in normal times. In a period of macro stress, they require deliberate institutional will to protect.

The energy shock is real. The inflation pressure is real. The caution in lP markets is real. But so is the body of evidence that female-founded companies, built with discipline and purpose, have historically delivered resilient returns precisely because they were built without the luxury of easy capital.

The war in the Gulf did not create the gender gap in venture funding. But it will most definitely deepen it. unless the people who control capital decide, deliberately, that this time the recovery will be different.

Because here is the thing about a 179-year timeline: it is not fate. It is a projection based on current behaviour. And behaviour, unlike oil price, is something we can actually choose to change.