Celebrating wins for women this week!

I was very proud to see that in the The 2023 Women Entrepreneur Cities (WE Cities) Index , compiled with Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN), London beat both New York and San Francisco as a city that incubates female founders! The city beat 55 other cities to be ranked as number 1 for its ability to attract and foster female entrepreneurs.

We do have wonderful initiatives in our country that support and work to advance women in business.?

For example, Telegraph Media Group and NatWest’s 100 Female Entrepreneurs to Watch list is an initiative that shines a spotlight on some of the most exciting female-founded businesses in the UK. Those who make it to the list earn many benefits including mentorship, media coverage and enterprise health check, a ￡10,000 investment from NatWest and more,

NatWest CEO and judge Alison Rose, said that all entrants shared the following - a strong commitment to innovation, a social purpose and scaling up, and that their ambition and resilience of the business owners came across strongly in the applications.

Rose is no stranger to supporting the advancement of women. In 2019, she was commissioned by the Uk Treasury Department to lead an independent review of female entrepreneurship. Her report, The Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship , shed renewed light on the barriers faced by women starting and growing businesses and identified ways of unlocking this untapped talent. Rose found that ￡250 billion could be added to the UK economy if women could start and build businesses at the same rate as men.

In response, the government announced an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030, equivalent to nearly 600,000 additional female entrepreneurs.

The Rose Review is also behind other initiatives that support female entrepreneurs, including a continued recruitment campaign to encourage even more institutions to sign up to the Investing In Women Code .

“The Code is a commitment by financial services firms to give better access to female entrepreneurs to tools, resources and finance,” says Rose. “It commits lenders and investors to collect and report data about their performance backing female-led firms. The number of signatories rose by half over the past year – we now have more than 160 signatories, representing over ￡1 trillion in assets in management. We’re working with this group to deliver real change,” said Rose.

“We also rolled out the Women Backing Women campaign via the Women Angel Investment Taskforce, to support women to become business angels, giving female founders across the UK a better chance to access early-stage investment.”

There is no doubt that the journey to being a female entrepreneur is fraught with difficulties and challenges. The feature-length documentary, She Started It is a personal look into the lives of five women tech entrepreneurs in their journey to bring their products to market - including their self-doubt, failures and successes as they pitch to VCs for investment and try to build teams. More importantly, the documentary explores the cultural roots of female underrepresentation in entrepreneurship, the lack of venture capital funding made available to women-led companies as well as the realities that women entrepreneurs face.

Statistics back this up. An About Time magazine article focusing on female tech entrepreneurs to watch, highlighted a study by PwC , which found that only 15% of employees working in STEM roles in the UK are female, with only 5% of leadership positions in tech held by women.

Another article by Sifted Magazine highlights that only 28% of start-ups have a female founder, indicating that men continue to own the majority of digital enterprises. Other interesting stats in the article highlight that in 2012, 87% of all VC funding in Europe was raised by men-only founding teams — while the proportion of funding raised by women-only teams dropped from 3% to 1% since 2018. Ethnically diverse founders have also suffered. Just 1.4% of European unicorns are set up by a founding team entirely made up of ethnically diverse entrepreneurs, and those founders have raised a measly 0.7% of total unicorn funding.

While we may still have a long way to go, I am encouraged that much is being done to bring about change.

Another positive and impactful initiative to address these issues is Morgan Stanley ’s Multicultural Innovation Lab which specifically provides mentoring and financial investment to women and ethnically diverse founders.

MD and EMEA head of the Lab, Sanghamitra Karra, says that ‘In a world where investors are still predominantly white men, there’s a need to over-index and actively “showcase the successes of these extremely talented women”, not just as a question of equity but of business imperative.

“Different kinds of founders tend to solve different kinds of problems with hugely innovative solutions,” she adds. “These women are world leaders in this space and more people need to hear their stories.”

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