Women in Germany are increasingly starting their own businesses: According to the Women Entrepreneurship Monitor In 2024/25, the GEM (German Economic Institute) founding rate of women reached 8.5 percent, the highest figure ever recorded. This value represents the proportion of 18- to 64-year-olds who have founded a company in the last three and a half years or are currently in the process of founding one.
Compared to 2023, the rate increased by 2.6 percentage points. The rate of entrepreneurship among men also rose, increasing by 1.7 percentage points to 11 percent. This also narrowed the so-called gender gap: the difference between the sexes in the entrepreneurship rate decreased from 3.4 percentage points to 2.5 percentage points. This places Germany in the top third internationally, among countries with comparatively small gender-specific differences in entrepreneurial activity.
City or country: Women start businesses regardless of where they live.
A regional comparison reveals an urban advantage in business start-up rates: In urban areas, the GEM start-up rate was higher for both women (5.4 percent) and men (9.5 percent) than in rural areas (women 4.3 percent, men 6.5 percent). However, the difference between urban and rural areas is smaller for women. This suggests that place of residence plays a less significant role in women's decision to start a business than in men's.
Regarding innovation, the 2024 report reveals only minor gender differences: 5.7 percent of male founders offered products or services that were new to the global market, compared to 4.8 percent of female founders. In the category "new to Germany," the proportion was significantly higher for men (18.2 percent compared to 5.6 percent for women). However, in the category "new to the region," women showed a higher percentage (29 percent) than men (15.1 percent). These differences may indicate that women more frequently develop regionally focused or service-oriented business models, while men tend to pursue more global technology and product innovations.
According to the report, there are also differences in the assessment of the importance of artificial intelligence for the business model: While 45.3 percent of male founders consider AI to be ‘very important’, only 32.1 percent of female founders agree.
Sustainability with economic impact
Another key finding concerns sustainability: According to the report, female founders more frequently achieve positive economic effects through environmentally conscious practices. 63.4 percent of women report generating higher revenue through sustainable measures, compared to 49.3 percent of men. Women also significantly outperform men in terms of profit and job creation. However, men score higher in the category of "more customers."
Gender-specific patterns also emerge when it comes to informal investments: In 2024, 57.7 percent of female informal investors invested in other women, while 64.1 percent of male informal investors supported men. Overall, informal investors (8.7 percent of 18- to 64-year-olds) are more common than female informal investors (5.1 percent). Besides investing in family and friends, women also invest more in founders they don't know than men do.
The Women Entrepreneurship Monitor 2024/25 provides, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of female and male entrepreneurship activity in Germany and in international comparison.
The analyses are based on data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which have been collected in over 50 countries since 1999. The German analyses are prepared by the RKW Competence Center in cooperation with the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute on behalf of Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.
