Women in Germany are founding businesses more frequently: According to the Women Entrepreneurship Monitor 2024/25, the GEM founding rate for women reached 8.5 percent in 2024, the highest level ever. This figure describes the proportion of 18- to 64-year-olds who have founded a business in the last three and a half years or are currently in the founding process.
Compared to 2023, the rate rose by 2.6 percentage points. The founding rate for men also increased, rising by 1.7 percentage points to 11 percent. This also narrowed the so-called gender gap: the difference between genders in the founding rate decreased from 3.4 percentage points to 2.5 percentage points. This places Germany in the leading third internationally compared to countries with relatively small gender-specific differences in founding activity.
City or countryside: women found businesses regardless of location
In regional comparison, founding rates show an urban advantage: in urban regions, the GEM founding rate was higher for both women (5.4 percent) and men (9.5 percent) than in rural regions (women 4.3 percent, men 6.5 percent). For women, however, the difference between city and countryside is smaller. This suggests that place of residence plays a less significant role in women’s decision to found a business than for men.
On the topic of innovation, the 2024 report shows only minor gender differences: 5.7 percent of founders offered products or services that are new to the world market, compared to 4.8 percent for female founders. In the “new to Germany” category, the proportion was significantly higher for men (18.2 percent compared to 5.6 percent for women). In contrast, women showed a higher value in the “new to the region” category at 29 percent compared to men (15.1 percent). These differences may suggest that women more often develop regionally focused and service-oriented business models, while men tend to pursue more global technology and product innovations.
According to the report, there are also differences in how founders assess the importance of artificial intelligence for their business model: while 45.3 percent of founders consider AI “very important”, only 32.1 percent of female founders do.
Sustainability with economic impact
Another key finding concerns sustainability: according to the report, female founders more often 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 outperform men in both profit and job creation. However, men score higher on the criterion of “more customers”.
Gender-specific patterns also emerge in informal investments: 57.7 percent of informal female investors invested in other women in 2024, while 64.1 percent of informal male investors supported men. Overall, informal investors (8.7 percent of 18- to 64-year-olds) are more common than informal female investors (5.1 percent). In addition to investing in “family & friends”, women invest more in unfamiliar founders than men do.
The Women Entrepreneurship Monitor 2024/25 provides the first comprehensive analysis of female and male founding activity in Germany and in international comparison.
The analyses are based on data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which has been collected in over 50 countries since 1999. The German evaluations are prepared by the RKW Competence Centre in cooperation with the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economics and Climate Protection.
