In the summer of 2023, Australia and New Zealand played joint hosts to the FIFA Women’s World Cup. And all of a sudden, Australia was swept up in all-consuming Matildas Mania.

More than 70% of Australians watched the tournament, and 2 million attended matches in person. ‘Matildas’ was the Australian Word of the Year.

Almost overnight, we saw a seismic shift in attitudes towards women’s football. Or at least, that’s what it felt like.

“The foundations for that ‘overnight success’ stem back to very considered, thoughtful, complex decisions and investments over the last decade,” says Noga Edelstein.

The change we saw was the result of a combined effort at all levels of the sporting ecosystem — an effort specifically targeted to meeting the needs of women in sport.

“It was necessary to unpack all the barriers and design systems to replace them. Negotiating equal pay with the Socceroos by convincing the men to forego a payrise in lieu of a profit-share;  implementing a landmark paid parental leave policy for players and carer provisions to allow for return-to-play; negotiating sponsorship deals that weren’t focused on engagement metrics, at a time before anyone believed in the power of women's sport; and of course ensuring that women were appointed into leadership positions in every area of the sport’s organisation,” Noga explains.

“The Matildas have totally transformed the system for women in football, not by doing things the way they have always been done, but by creating a new playbook.”

That effort paid off in spades.

According to Football Australia, the FIFA Women’s World Cup generated $1.3 billion in economic impact in Australia, including through media value, ticket sales, record-breaking demand for merch, and even reduced healthcare costs due to increased physical activity among new soccer fans.

That’s before we consider the legacy of the tournament: the increase in government investment in women’s sports since, and the next generation of young women who have been inspired to kick a ball.

The question, for Noga, is: How can we take what we’ve learnt from investing in women’s sport, and apply that to investing in women in business?

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A $135 billion opportunity

It’s come up in almost every interview we’ve conducted for this series that investing in women-led businesses isn’t an act of charity.

It may be the right thing to do, morally, but it’s also lucrative, with studies showing women-led businesses tend to generate more revenue, grow more quickly and create more jobs.

Widening the lens, that means there’s an economic opportunity that we’re collectively failing to tap into.

Economist Amanda Robbins has a background in government and public policy, most notably in the Federal Treasury and as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Treasurer in the former Labor government. For the past decade or so, however, she has been building and running her own consultancy, Equity Economics.

Amanda launched Equity with the goal of changing the way public policy is created in Australia, bringing in the voices and viewpoints of the communities and people most affected by policy, but who have historically been excluded from the process.

It’s a firm built on a bedrock of equity and inclusion. So it’s no surprise that, as an economist and an entrepreneur, Amanda is well across the funding statistics for women-led businesses in Australia.

“I’m continually stunned,” she says.

“Women are so woefully underfunded in Australia, it’s astounding. We are seeing some improvements, but they’re minuscule compared to the size of the actual challenge.”

Globally, the International Finance Corporation reports US $1.7 trillion in unmet demand for financing for women-led startups.

In 2019, a Boston Consulting Group paper suggested that if women and men participated equally in entrepreneurship, global GDP could be boosted by 2% to 3%, or anywhere between US $2.5 trillion and $5 trillion.

In Australia, estimates suggest funding women to the same extent we fund men could add between AUD $70 billion and $135 billion to the economy.

“To put that in context,” Amanda says, “the Commonwealth Government last year spent $137 billion on health, aged care and sport, combined.

“That’s something we could potentially tap into if we just boosted the number of women-led businesses, and funded them.”

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Can we bake a bigger pie?

These numbers are large. But Amanda warns they’re not quite as clear cut as they first appear. It’s not as simple as picking up the cash left on the table.

Currently, venture funding is not evenly split between men and women (far, far from it). But even if it was, there wouldn’t necessarily be more capital going into the economic pot, overall.

Women would be getting a larger piece of the pie. But would the pie itself get any bigger or would it just be more evenly distributed?

“It’s not a direct link that simply redistributing the available capital to women-led firms will necessarily cause the economy to grow faster,” Amanda explains.

“But limited access to finance does mean that women with ideas, skills and capacity to contribute to the economy are often missing out on economic opportunities and are undervalued,” she adds.

“It means the products and services they could be generating are simply not available; it means women are earning a lot less, which we know is a persistent challenge; and it also means that women, who often invest more in other women, are less able to do that.

“It means it’s a less diverse business environment, and that comes with costs.”

In 2023, the Federal Government’s Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce report found that just by participating more fully in the workforce — running businesses or otherwise — women could add $128 billion to the economy.

Equally, research increasingly shows companies with diverse leadership teams outperform financially, create more social impact, and have more satisfied employees.

And Boston Consulting Group research has found that for every dollar of funding invested, women-founded startups generated $0.78 of revenue, on average, compared to $0.31 for male-founded startups.

“That’s such a stark difference,” Amanda says.

“There’s clearly a huge opportunity here. There’s a need for male-founded businesses and mixed-founder businesses. But we’re just missing a wicket if we don’t invest in women-founded businesses as well.”

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How do we get there?

The goal here is not to take money out of the pockets of male entrepreneurs. In an ideal world, we would have equitable access to capital and equal distribution. To get there, we’re going to need a bigger pie.

This is something Noga Edelstein has been mulling for some time. There’s a finite amount of additional VC funding we can conjure, so perhaps the key is to find more sources of capital to bring to the table.

“We need to think about more diverse sources of funding that the VC pie on its own can’t solve for,” Noga says. 

“As an example, the government should be leading the way by allocating innovation funding with a gender-equity lens. To put it in context, VC deployed a total of $3.5 billion in Australia in 2023. Yet the National Reconstruction Fund alone is $15 billion.

“That’s where there is huge economic potential to unlock.”

We also can’t ignore or underestimate the bias in the system we have to overcome. That applies not only to assumptions made about women founders, but to assumptions made about women who invest in women founders.

As Amanda notes, a Harvard Business Review study of more than 2,000 venture-backed firms in the US found women-led startups with only women on their cap tables are half as likely to successfully raise a second time, compared to those with male investors. For male founders, the gender of early investors made no notable difference. 

Another study, of 200 MBA students, found that women founders backed by women are viewed less favourably and perceived to be less competent, both when compared to a male founder and when compared to a woman founder with a male investor.

We need women backing women, Amanda says. But we also need to make sure it’s not only women in the conversation.

“Let’s not just put more pressure on women to fix it.

“Let’s make sure there are men funding women-led firms at those early stages so that women aren’t automatically hit with another gender-based roadblock.

“We want the diversity of leadership and ideas — that is of huge economic value. But the burden shouldn’t purely be on women to fix the structural balance we see here.”

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Reimagining the playing field

For Noga, closing the gender funding gap is about reimagining Australia’s economy; moving women out of the passenger seat and putting them behind the wheel. 

She’s frustrated, she says, that current government policy settings are fixated on getting women into jobs, rather than supporting them to create jobs. Which, of course, would result in them hiring more women. Mission accomplished.

“We also know that women-led companies deliver superior environmental, social and governance outcomes.

“Sure, equality is important, but business is a numbers game, and women are the single biggest lever Australia has to transform the economy. We’re underutilising 50% of our economic potential,” Noga says.

For Football Australia and The Matildas, the triumph of the FIFA Women’s World Cup was just the beginning. 

The success of 2023 unlocked hundreds of millions of investment into community sports clubs and initiatives. It fostered a sense of national pride; it changed the attitudes of men and boys; and it inspired the next generation of women and girls in sport.

It’s true in sport and in entrepreneurship that success breeds success. But in order to get the flywheel turning, we too need to throw out the current playbook, systemically remove the barriers to women within it, and write a whole new one.

“The current system has been designed by men, for men,” Noga says.

“If we want women to succeed, we have to completely reimagine what the playing field looks like.”

And if you’re feeling bad for the Socceroos, who agreed to forego that pay rise, don’t. Matildas merch is currently outselling Socceroos 2:1, so the collective revenue share deal is working out quite nicely for everyone.