New Women Entrepreneurship Monitor 2024/25 shows: Female founders in Germany are clearly catching up

The German country team of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) has published its first comprehensive report on female start-ups. The Women Entrepreneurship Monitor 2024/25 analyzes female founders in Germany in an international comparison and is based on data that has been collected annually in over 50 countries since 1999. The study was compiled by the RKW Competence Center and the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute. It was written by Dr. Natalia Gorynia-Pfeffer, Armin Baharian, Julia Schauer, Dr. Gesine Tuitjer, Dr. Christian Bergholz and Dr. Florian Täube.

Start-up rate of women at record level

The key message: the gender gap in start-ups is shrinking noticeably. The GEM start-up rate for women will rise to 8.5% in 2024, the highest figure ever measured in Germany. Compared to the previous year, this represents an increase of 2.6 percentage points, a stronger increase than for male founders.

This narrows the gap between the genders from 3.4 percentage points (2023) to 2.5 percentage points. This puts Germany in the top third of all high-income countries in an international comparison. In many countries, such as Norway with a difference of 7.6 percentage points, the gender gaps are significantly larger.

The GEM start-up rate describes the proportion of 18- to 64-year-olds who have started or are currently starting a business in the last 3.5 years.

Urban-rural difference less pronounced for women

The analysis of the national GEM data from 2015 to 2024 shows that both men and women are more likely to start a business in urban regions than in rural areas. However, the gap is significantly smaller for women:

• Women: 5.4% (urban) vs. 4.3% (rural)
• Men: 9.5 % (urban) vs. 6.5 % (rural)

The relative difference is around 20 percent for women and just under 30 percent for men. The place of residence therefore appears to be less decisive for start-up activities for women than for men.

Level of innovation: hardly any differences in global innovations

In the area of innovation, it was examined whether female and male founders offer products or services that are new worldwide. There is little difference in 2024:

• Male founders: 5.7 %
• Female founders: 4.8 %

The gap is therefore only 0.9 percentage points, which indicates a comparable level of innovation between the genders.

Men rate AI as business-critical more often

The genders differ significantly more when it comes to AI. In 2024, 45% of founders rate artificial intelligence as "very important" for their own business model, compared to just 32% of female founders.

For established companies, the reference to AI is lower in both groups, but the gap between female and male founders remains.

Female founders are more likely to expect positive economic benefits from sustainability

In terms of ecological sustainability, female founders in 2024 report positive economic effects more often than average:

• Increase in turnover: women 63.4%, men 49.3%
• Increase in profits: women 62.8%, men 42.5%
• Employment growth: women 50 %, men 42.3 %

Men are only ahead when it comes to acquiring new customers (women 59%, men 69%).

The study thus shows that sustainability-oriented business models pay off particularly often for female founders. It can be downloaded from the homepage of the RKW Competence Center.

Important information for the start-up scene

From an entrepreneurial point of view, it is actually bordering on madness that factors such as gender, origin or faith still have an influence on who starts a business and what opportunities founders are given. In a functioning market economy, it should not matter who is behind an idea. The only thing that matters is whether a business model can hold its own on the market and whether a product delivers real added value. This is precisely why analyses such as the Women Entrepreneurship Monitor are so important: they show precisely where we stand, where structural differences are still noticeable and how far we still have to go to achieve real equality in the start-up scene. In doing so, they create a data-based foundation for breaking down barriers and developing the ecosystem sustainably.

We would therefore like to thank the RKW Competence Center, the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute for Innovation and Value Creation in Rural Areas and especially Dr. Natalia Gorynia-Pfeffer for their valuable insights.