With International Women’s Day on the horizon, the founders of HR-tech platform TruthWorks , have recreated one of tech’s most recognisable images – the start-up funding announcement photo. You know the one. Founders in black T-shirts. Confident poses. A carefully casual backdrop. And its ‘Amsterdam unicorn’ counterpart on the canals in shirts and jeans.
TruthWork’s version is called Dressed for the Yes – a tongue-in-cheek protest highlighting a stubborn reality from Emily Firth and Rhiannon Stroud and their director of product, Sophie Drummond. All-female founding teams receive just 2% of global venture capital funding. Despite widespread awareness of this issue, the number has barely moved in more than a decade. In the UK it sits at 2.1%. For minority women founders, it drops to just 0.02%.
The images, launched across LinkedIn and social media, deliberately parody the aesthetic of male-led start-up success stories, copying the pose, posture and wardrobe seen in countless funding announcements.
“We wanted to raise awareness that the same people – and to be clear that’s mainly men of a certain race and certain profile – continue to get funded, while year on year women get left behind. Despite the evidence of how successful female founded businesses are. Search ‘unicorn tech funding announcement’ and the images all look the same,” Emily Firth stated. “Clearly there is a pattern. So we decided to recreate what we saw.”
“If this is what a ‘fundable’ founding team looks like, consider your boxes ticked,” added Rhiannon Stroud. “We’ve been told for years that if women want funding, we need to adapt. Be more confident. More “founder-like”. More like the guys in the black t-shirts or the crisp blue shirts by the canal. So we studied the pattern and copied it. Same poses. Same wardrobe. Same confidence. The only thing we didn’t copy is the performance. Because women-led businesses already outperform, yet all-female founding teams still receive just 2% of global VC funding. If we match your template and you’re still not investing, the problem isn’t how women show up. It’s how you decide who’s worth a yes.”
The stunt highlights what many founders privately acknowledge: venture capital often runs on pattern recognition. Its message is a simple truth: Women shouldn’t have to change. The system must.
“Every time another start-up announces funding, it looks like the same group of guys,” Stroud noted. “That is the bias we wanted to confront. The costume is satire, but the bias is real.”
The campaign also responds to this year’s International Women’s Day theme, Give to Gain.
“Women have been giving for decades,” Firth commented. “We’ve delivered returns. We’ve delivered resilience. If ‘Give to Gain’ worked, the funding gap wouldn’t still be 2%. The question isn’t what women need to give. It’s what investors and the system to access investment needs to change.”
TruthWorks is a tech-enabled marketplace connecting organisations directly with vetted people and Cculture experts. It is currently entering its next phase of funding and scaling internationally, confronting the very system it must navigate to grow. For International Women’s Day, the company is inviting other founders, especially male advocates, and progressive VC leaders to highlight the funding gap – and to ask investors, publicly, to help change the face of who gets funded.
