The problem FairShare solves

Why FairShare?

Previous research has found that female entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in traditional funding markets (Zhao, 2020). Access to financial capital is one of the highest hurdles to start and grow a new company, and the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs have been shown to be more severe than men (Venkatesh et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2019).
Given that trustworthiness is a very important factor in crowdfunding, the “trustworthiness” of women entrepreneurs makes them more likely to acquire financial support through crowdfunding. If people feel good about their financial contributions to an enterprise such as the positive sensation one may feel in promoting gender equality, they are more likely to offer funds regardless of the actual returns on their investments according to warm-glow theory. Crowd investors are more willing to support female entrepreneurs. Hence, the advantage of being a female entrepreneur is likely to be greater than their male counterparts when it comes to crowdfunding.

What can it do?

1. Crowdfunding: FareShare is a crowdfunding platform (both equity and reward) for women-led businesses who seek alternative funding and an investment gateway for gender lens investing.
2. Gender Lens Investing Gateway: Apart from investing in crowdfunding campaigns, investors are given avenues to diversify their investment via the gender equality funds list(source: genderequalityfunds.org, which is ranked by gender equality scores).
3. Gender Toolkit: The app has a gender lens toolkit with three features:
   • Gender Lens Scorecard Test
   • Investor Risk Profiler
   • Media Analyzer using Natural Language Processing
4. Benchmarking (Gender Equality Funds and Equity Index): The Gender Lens Mutual Fund features a list of mutual funds with their performances over the years and is ranked based on the gender lens score.

5. Dashboard and Login: The dashboard keeps track of and up

Challenges we ran into

Lack of benchmarking tools: There are currently not many gender equality benchmarking tools available in traditional or non-traditional funding markets.

Finding the stats and NLP models was difficult.