In this year’s annual Female Founders Forum report, we take stock of what progress women entrepreneurs have made over the past several years since we started researching and campaigning on policies to remove obstacles they face in starting and growing a business.
Written by Margaret Mitchell, and featuring stories from numerous leading women entrepreneurs, among other things, we show how the amount of equity funding for female-led startups remains stubbornly low.
With just under a third of British entrepreneurs being women, the UK has an unusually low proportion of female entrepreneurs. This is a particularly important group, because their companies and vision will have a greater impact on the state of technology and the economy in the decades to come. Female founders are able to bring new insight, creating businesses for women, by women, that better serve their needs.
In One In A Million, we surveyed some of Britain’s most trailblazing female founders, to showcase their success, and shine a spotlight on the barriers that they continue to face as women.
In Inspiring Innovation, the latest Female Founders Forum report produced in partnership with Barclays, Aria Babu looks at female entrepreneurship in the high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, and greentech.
She makes three broad recommendations for boosting female entrepreneurship, namely: closing the gender funding gap, which currently sees female founders raising only 15% of all equity finance; tackling STEM drop-off rates, which have resulted in just 17% of tech workers being women; and providing more female role models, given that mentorship has proven to be an effective way of encouraging women to start and scale businesses.
COVID-19 has posed significant challenges to most companies, but our new analysis of data from Beauhurst indicates that female-led, high-growth companies have been disproportionately impacted throughout the pandemic. However, despite this impact, more than 60% of female-founded, equity-backed businesses are now operating with minimal disruption to their business, showing that female-led businesses are fighting back.
Resilience and Recovery, a new report from The Entrepreneurs Network produced in partnership with Barclays, combines discussions with female founders and original data analysis, to identify the reasons why female entrepreneurs have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though women make up just a fifth of business owners, we are seeing increasing numbers setting up companies, and receiving a growing share of investment. In Here and Now, we reveal that while 11% of startups that raised equity investment for the first time in 2011 were female-founded, by 2018, that figure had nearly doubled. We also show that, once funded, the percentage of female-founded startups that raised additional rounds of capital was similar to non-female-founded firms.
In order to close the gender gap for good, our report makes recommendations for the government, schools, the media, and venture capitalists – from shining a light on female entrepreneurs, to tackling the STEM drop-off rates among girls in education.
The UK needs more early-stage businesses achieving longer-term survival and scale. Supporting female entrepreneurs is not just about increasing the number of women-owned businesses: it is about raising their performance and growth potential. Not only will this lead to more established SMEs contributing more to economic growth, but they could also serve as inspiration to young girls.
As more and more women turn promising ideas into thriving businesses, they will make up a greater share of entrepreneurial role models, thereby encouraging more women into the pipeline – from schoolgirls considering STEM to founders scaling big. According to our survey, less than a third of women now think gender has been a hindrance to success. However, the figure for men is a negligible 1 per cent.
In partnership with Barclays, this year the Female Founders Forum focused on mentoring. This report is based on the insights of speed-mentoring events held across the country, which were attended by both experienced and novice female entrepreneurs. Also, following up the theme of last year's Untapped Unicorns report, we have updated updated the data on female founders' access to equity finance.
Studies have shown that access to finance remains a persistent barrier to female entrepreneurs. We partnered with Barclays on the Female Founders Forum – a group of some of the UK’s most successful female entrepreneurs, who’ve joined heads to come up with tangible, actionable recommendations for tackling the funding issue. The project’s first report, Untapped Unicorns, outlines how Britain can scale up female entrepreneurship.
The Female Founders Forum is a group of some of the UK's most successful female entrepreneurs. These briefing paper cover the four roundtables we hosted at Barclays, Octopus Investments, Parliament and the London Stock Exchange. The ideas from these roundtables formed the basis of the Untapped Unicorns report. The Female Founders Forum is run in partnership with Barclays.
