This week we released our sixth annual Female Founders Forum report One In A Million with Barclays. Unlike in previous years, where we have repackaged and drawn out themes in other people's data, this year we have created our own new data set. We talked to members female entrepreneurs, who have raised at least £1m in equity finance, and asked them about what it is like to be a female founder in Britain in 2022. Here is what we found:
72% of our founders believe that it would have been easier for them to raise equity finance if they were a man;
59% of our founders report having been discriminated against because of their gender;
Female founders are much better educated than the general population. They are twice as likely to have have a degree and ten times more likely to have a postgraduate qualification;
The chore gap for female founders is the same as it is for other working women. Half the founders who are mothers say they take on the majority of housework.
I hope that has whet your appetite because there is much more in the report. If you'd like a condensed version you can read our Twitter thread or the coverage in the Times. And if you're interested in the chore gap for female founders, and ways we can make childcare cheaper, I have written about that here, here, and here.
We launched the report in the House of Lords. Thanks to everyone who made it there. There was so much energy and passion in the room and it made such an excellent event. We had the support of Baroness Jenkin, who is a great champion of women in politics and who, before entering politics, founded a business and Maria Caulfield, the Minister for Women and a great advocate for women's empowerment. Below is a version of the speech I gave.
First of all, I need to say thank you to all the founders who helped put the report together. There are only about 2000 women who have raised at least £1m in equity finance, and about 5% of them have been a part of this project in some way. We have been running the Female Founders Forum for several years, but until now we’ve been reliant on general data from the business literature. The vast majority of people who start businesses are not high-growth founders and I think people face very different interests when they run very different businesses. The policy issues for women who run kitchen-table businesses because they are trying to work less and spend more time with their children are very different to those who are trying to revolutionise banking or green energy. As a result I feel honoured that such a small and thinly stretched group has been so generous with their time and attention.
But let's go back to basics. Why should we care about female entrepreneurs? I think to some it may feel like this is a luxury issue – when we’re talking about founders we are talking about a. tiny portion of the population and often (but not always) quite a privileged portion of the population.
But I think they're of critical importance. First, barriers that thwart female entrepreneurs are barriers to our own economic growth. In the UK we have significantly fewer female founders than similar countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands, Australia, the US and Canada. Young companies are engines of growth and we’re losing out on about £200bn of economic output because we are behind our peer countries.
Second, founders have influence. By starting a company and creating new products you have a disproportionate influence over the world. You can determine what gets sold and how it works, and you set the cultures in your companies and industries. The systematic underrepresentation of women in decision making roles has created a world that is not built for women.
Here’s a small example. I had a meeting the other day in a VC firm’s offices and I had to sign in on a screen and then it took a picture of me for my pass. I’m 5ft3 – which is the average height of a British woman, and I think my arms are a pretty normal length. But I couldn’t reach the screen and stand in range for the picture at the same time.
This is obviously just a minor inconvenience but it is illustrative of a broader issue. How many of us take aspirin or paracetamol? How many of us are a woman of 'childbearing age?'. Well, until 1993 the US FDA banned clinical trials on women of childbearing age, meaning that many of us regularly take medicines that were approved before they were properly tested on people with our biology.
It’s damaging to women to exclude us from the decision making processes. This is why it is so important to increase the number of women in politics, and in business, and in STEM fields. And, as we have seen an increase in the number of women in senior roles, we have seen more and more products made for women by women.
Just look at the very first case study in the report. Irene McAleese makes bike lights that gather data on people’s cycling habits. She’s passionate about the health and lifestyle benefits of cycling and wants to help close the gender cycling gap. With the bike lights she’s found some really interesting differences between how men and women cycle and she’s using this data to help policy makers make more women-friendly urban design choices.
And third, female founders face the same issues that all women face. How do we navigate careers with the ingrained expectations about household labour? I was shocked to learn that despite being incredibly successful, 46% of the female founders who are mothers say that they do the majority of the housework. Only 12% say that their partners do more. These are similar numbers to the rest of British mothers who work full time.
And discrimination is something we all deal with. Founders talked to me about how they were ignored in meetings, about how male investors don’t take them seriously, and about how they are generally believed to be less competent and worthy than their male counterparts. Still only 16% of equity finance goes to companies with a female founder. 72% of our founders believe they would have found it easier to raise equity if they were men.
The interests of high-growth female founders should be all of our interests too. Discrimination and poorly built systems are making all of our lives worse and it’s time we addressed these issues head-on.
We have a series of recommendations in the report. I have a whole list of ways that we can make childcare more affordable. We need to address the fact that girls, despite being as talented in maths and science, do not feel as though they can continue onto careers in these fields. We need to change the culture in the media and how the press discusses female founders. And we need investors to stop investing in people who are like them and already in their networks.
Even if they don’t care about inequality, it’s bad for business.
Best wishes,
Aria
P.S If you would like to keep up to date with what we're doing with the Female Founders Forum, make sure you subscribe to our newsletters and follow The Entrepreneurs Network on Twitter. We're trying to raise the salience of these issues and raise the profile of female founders (on their own terms) so that they are viable role models for all the women who have a business in them but haven't made the leap yet. To that end, please to share the report and the Twitter thread on any platform that you have.