Women are much more likely than men to self-finance their business. Rather than go into debt or sell shares, women commonly use personal savings, earnings from the business, home equity loans, credit cards, and family loans to finance their business. In this third in our series of articles for NCWIT and the Kauffman Foundation on the under-representation of women entrepreneurs in the IT field, we survey the social science literature for what it says about the gendered difference in access to capital for entrepreneurs.

Why do women receive less than five percent of the funding to start IT firms? Why do they lag behind men in patenting IT ideas and moving their ideas out of the university and into the marketplace?

On behalf of [begin link /]NCWIT[end link], and with support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, we consulted the social science literature for answers to these questions.

Recently, Lucy Sanders of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) had lunch with Sun's "Succeeding @ Sun as a Woman Engineer" (SASWE) networking group. Lucy talked about NCWIT's mission to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing. I came away from the lunch with questions about why young women aren't more fascinated by computing.

As of 2006, according to The Center for Women's Business Research, there were about 7.7 million majority-women-owned (51 percent or more) businesses in this country, accounting for nearly one-third of all U.S. businesses. In the last decade, in fact, women-owned firms have grown at more than twice the rate of U.S. businesses overall.