Industry Growth Program grants: women founders received just 8.6% of funding

Fresh FOI documents show women-owned businesses accounted for roughly 20 per cent of Industry Growth Program applicants but only 8.6 per cent of approved grants before the $392 million scheme was paused earlier this month.

Disclosed by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) under freedom of information and reported by Startup Daily, the numbers cover grant rounds between July 2024 and December 2025. Of 1,876 applications during the period, 375 came from women-owned businesses. But just 9 of the 104 grants approved went to women-owned ventures — a conversion rate of 2.4 per cent, compared with an overall approval rate of about 5.5 per cent.

The department said there were no demographic preferences built into the IGP’s eligibility. “There are no specific eligibility or preferential requirements for any particular demographic under the IGP,” a DISR spokesperson told Startup Daily.

Measured by women-led businesses — those with a woman in a C-suite role — the gap narrows to 11 of the 104 approved grants. But the FOI data lands in a week when the government’s posture toward startup support is under scrutiny on multiple fronts. The IGP was quietly paused on 12 May and $47.4 million in uncommitted grant funding clawed back in the federal budget. Meanwhile, the Boosting Female Founders (BFF) program, the government’s only dedicated women-founder vehicle, was killed in mid-2024 with about $17 million of its $52.2 million allocation unspent.

Government grants are not the only place the pattern shows up. Cut Through Venture’s latest quarterly data put the share of VC funding going to women-only founding teams at less than 0.5 per cent in the second quarter of 2025 — a record low, down from about 4 per cent in 2023 and 2 per cent in 2024. The IGP’s 8.6 per cent grant share for women-owned businesses, while higher than the VC figure, still represents an attrition from the 20 per cent applicant share. It mirrors the private market’s pattern: women founders show up but don’t get through at anywhere near the rate of their male counterparts.

It being cut is going to put women behind massively.
— Amanda Rose, founder of Entrepreneurial & Small Business Women Australia

Amanda Rose, who runs Entrepreneurial & Small Business Women Australia and mentored founders through the BFF program before it was axed, told Women’s Agenda that individual founders saw real returns from targeted grants — credibility to attract follow-on private capital, skills development, and operating runway. But the programs keep being killed before they can demonstrate that impact at scale.

The DISR’s internal evaluation of BFF found it “did not have a measurable impact on the wider startup sector,” a bar that critics argue conflates individual business outcomes with system-wide transformation. The program’s $35.2 million in direct grants was never sized to shift systemic bias on its own. And the IGP data suggests the gender-neutral alternative — a program with no demographic preferences — does not produce gender-neutral outcomes.

There are signs the FOI numbers understate the pipeline problem. The documents show women-owned businesses made up 16.6 per cent of IGP advisory service assignments — 150 of 905 — well above their 8.6 per cent grant share. Attrition appears to worsen between the advisory stage and actual grant submission, though the department has not released data on application-to-grant conversion rates broken down by gender.

State governments are building their own programs in the vacuum left by Canberra. NSW in April launched a $4 million Diversity Pre-Accelerator Program for under-represented founders, months after the funding was first announced. Queensland runs its own Backing Female Founders initiative.

The Diversity Pre-Accelerator Program is about backing talent wherever it exists, breaking down barriers that prevent under-represented founders from turning ideas into viable businesses.
— Anoulack Chanthivong, NSW Minister for Innovation

But state programs, even at $4 million each, cannot match the scale of a federal commercialisation scheme that had disbursed 96 grants totalling $143 million by November 2025 — roughly half its initial funding pool. Whether the programs that replace the IGP will be designed with the FOI numbers in mind is the question for women founders. Or whether a gender-neutral successor will reproduce the same pattern.

That question is becoming harder to avoid. The federal government is simultaneously facing a founder backlash over proposed capital gains tax changes that investors and startup advocates warn could accelerate a talent and capital exodus. Grants, tax settings, targeted programs — the startup policy stack is being rewritten in real time, and the FOI data provides the clearest picture yet of who actually benefited from the last round of spending.