Done with Support Programs

Women Don’t Need More Support Programs

They Need Funding.

If you’re a woman building a business, you’ve probably been told you’re so lucky to have access to so much “support”.

Programs for women, like you.
Incubator cohorts you can join.
Accelerators you can apply to.
Communities you can participate in.

And yet, when you strip it all back, the thing most women founders still don’t have is the one thing that actually changes outcomes:

Capital.

Not encouragement.
Not preparation.
Not another round of “almost”.

We STILL need funding.

For years, I’ve been actively advocating for more funding to flow directly to women. While there are some positive signals, the reality is hard to ignore.

In 2025, women-only founding teams received less than 0.5% of all capital raised in Australia — the lowest level on record.

Despite years of programs, initiatives, cohorts and strategies, the share of capital actually reaching women has not increased. It has gone backwards.

This is 100% why funding design matters.

I recently reviewed the Australian Government’s Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship (WiSE) Round 5 program.

WiSE is a large national initiative with a total funding pool of $9.77 million, offering grants of $1–2 million per project over up to five years. Its stated purpose is to address systemic barriers faced by women and girls in STEM and entrepreneurship.

One could agrue the intention is sound.
The investment ... significant.

But it’s important to be clear about how the money is designed to move.

Every dollar of this $9.77 million is structured to flow to intermediary organisations — not directly to women founders themselves.

Women may benefit indirectly through programs or initiatives.
But none of this capital is designed to land in women’s businesses, extend their runway, or reduce their personal financial risk.

To put that into perspective:

If $9.77 million were distributed as founder-level grants: at $25,000, around 390 women founders could be funded.

Women with businesses.
Women already building.
Women carrying risk.

Instead, the funding is routed entirely through intermediaries.

Now compare that to the Australian Government’s Industry Growth Program, which has been allocated around $392 million over four years to support business commercialisation and scale.

That’s roughly 40 times the size of the entire WiSE Round 5 funding pool.

One program is designed to place capital directly into companies.
The other — designed to support women — is not.

Here’s what this actually looks like on the ground.

When funding goes to intermediaries:

• the organisation gets paid
• the people running the program get paid
• the consultants get paid
• the reporting gets done

When the program end, those people move on to the next funded initiative, having been paid salaries during the project period. Founder, in contrast, well: 

• they are still not paid
• their business still doesn’t have runway
• their bills don’t disappear
• their mortgage doesn’t pause
• their personal savings are still on the line

When women complete the program, they do the work, show up fully and then go back to building their business with no more money than they had before.

That's the part that really annoys me no end. 

Support on its own doesn’t reduce risk for the founder. In fact, it places a higher risk burden on their shoulders. Let's face it. 

Runway reduces risk.
Revenue reduces risk.
External capital reduces risk.

Without those, “support programs” become a holding pattern — one that looks active from the outside and exhausting from the inside.

This is the sentence I hear most often from women founders:

“I don’t want to keep proving I’m ready. I want the chance to actually scale.”

Women want to build their own version of financial sustainability — not justify someone else’s.

They want trust.
They want agency.
They want enough time and capital to see if the thing actually works.

To be clear, this isn’t a blanket critique.

There are programs — in Australia and globally — that meaningfully back women by putting capital, credibility and autonomy directly in their hands. They treat women as founders, not pipeline problems.

But they are still the exception, not the rule.

A call to action

If you are a woman founder in Australia, I’d encourage you to do something simple — and powerful.

Write to the Minister responsible for the WiSE program.

Tell them:

• how many years you’ve been building your business
• the funding you’ve applied for and not received
• the programs you’ve participated in
• and how little capital has actually reached you

Tell your story.

If you’d like help, I’ve prepared a short email template and the relevant Ministerial contact details.

👉 Simply hit reply to this email with the words “FUND WOMEN” in the subject line, and I’ll send it through.

Because until women’s lived experiences are impossible to ignore, funding will continue to be distributed in ways that prioritise systems over founders — and we’ll keep pretending the system is founder-first.

Women don’t need more programs designed around them.

They need funding, trust, and time to build.

Anything else is just a well-designed delay.