Making Sense of the Gap: A Qualitative Study of How Stockholm Venture Capitalists Construct the Gender Funding Gap

Sammanfattning

Despite growing female entrepreneurial activity and broader societal progress toward gender equality, female founders continue to receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital (VC) funding. While existing research has identified structural sorting, network access, homophily, and cognitive gender bias as drivers of this persistent gender funding gap, less attention has been directed to investors' own accounts. Drawing on 14 semi-structured interviews with VC investors in the Stockholm ecosystem, this qualitative study addresses that gap by exploring how VC investors construct, justify, and make sense of investment practices and gender disparities in VC, and what mechanisms they perceive as reproducing or mitigating them. By applying Weick's (1995) sensemaking theory, the study finds that VC evaluation operates as a sensemaking activity organized around a return-maximizing master frame and a set of founder templates. Within this frame, everyday evaluative mechanisms reproduce the gap while appearing natural, rational, and meritocratic. The study further identifies a recurring pattern of displacement: investors acknowledge gender inequality at the industry level while distancing their own evaluative practices from contributing to it, showing how awareness can coexist with the gap's continued reproduction. The study contributes empirically by foregrounding the investor-side perspective, theoretically by introducing a sensemaking lens and the concept of displacement to the gender funding gap literature, and practically by suggesting that awareness-based interventions may be structurally insufficient and that mechanisms tied to the ecosystem's incentive structure may prove more effective.