How can support for female business founders continue after International Women’s Day?
With International Women’s Day having been observed yesterday, female entrepreneurs are being celebrated worldwide. The government also announced a timely new fund, worth £3m, to support visionary women who are starting their own businesses in scientific fields and seeking innovative solutions for climate change, energy efficiency and health issues specifically. This new fund is a positive step in the right direction – and bodes well for the upcoming Budget if Rishi Sunak continues to nurture this environment of encouraging small businesses and allowing the UK economy to flourish.
Although International Women’s Day is a fantastic opportunity to highlight entrepreneurial women, as the SME arena sees a rise in female business founders, this is a topic of conversation that should last all year round. In February, it was announced that around a third of the top jobs in the UK’s biggest firms are now filled by women – up from just 12.5% ten years ago. This week, a 31% rise was reported for women starting their own businesses in the UK. While significant strides have been made recently, it will take a continued, concerted effort to reach true parity at every level of business.
Despite the rise in female founders, however, women still face issues in the start-up and scale-up community because of their gender. Nationally representative research by IW Capital – a specialist SME investment provider – gauges some of the challenges faced by this community of founders and defines the issues currently present for many businesswomen in the UK.
Key findings:
- Just half of women believe that their professional success is down to personal merit, conviction and perseverance
- Two-thirds of women felt they had not been taken seriously by potential investors when raising money for new ventures
- 31% of women have ambitions to start their own business
- 23% of entrepreneurial women have never met an investor and wouldn’t know how to meet one
- Women are 21% less likely to consider an entrepreneurial route than men
- Men are 52% more likely to have the capital to start a business than women
- A third of women (33%) feel unsupported by the government to start their own business venture
Luke Davis, CEO and founder of the company that commissioned this research – IW Capital – commented on the findings;
“The new government fund undoubtedly takes a step in the right direction to help achieve equality but what we cannot afford to ignore is the grass-roots of business. Helping what is a hugely ambitious community of female entrepreneurs to achieve their business potential will not only help us reach parity but is also hugely beneficial to the UK economy as a whole.
Helping the ambitious eco-system of female founders that exists in the UK to achieve their potential will be hugely important to getting to the point of true equality in the world of business and investment.
The skills and experience gained at this level will have a marked impact on the number of women at the very top level of business and the financial services. A key factor in this is the availability of growth finance to women founders to help the businesses they run scale at speed and give them the best possible chance to become one of the next FTSE 100 companies with women on the board organically at every point of their journey.
The SME arena contributed £1.9 trillion to the UK’s economy in 2017 and so making sure that it has the widest possible pool of talent to draw from is vital. As the backbone of the private sector, they will be a huge factor in determining the success of Brexit and onwards. Encouraging investment into female-founded businesses is clearly something that must be improved upon through legislation as well as fostering an environment in which women feel that they have the support and resources available to start businesses.”
