Review into funds for female entrepreneurs

The Government has ordered the first “serious review” into the funding gap preventing women from becoming business leaders in Britain. It was announced a day after 200 business leaders, entrepreneurs and MPS signed an open letter published in The Daily Telegraph urging the Government to put money aside to help female entrepreneurship.

THE Government has ordered the first “serious review” into the funding gap that is preventing women from becoming business leaders in Britain.

Announced on International Women’s Day, and a day after 200 business leaders, entrepreneurs and MPS signed an open letter published in The Daily Telegraph urging the Government to put money aside to boost female entrepreneurship, the Treasury has pledged to examine the challenges facing businesswomen. The review will result in a report later in the year which will be a “call to arms” for the financial sector to “sit up, take notice, and to act” to help break down barriers women face when trying to access business funding. Robert Jenrick, the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, said The Telegraph’s “incredibly important” campaign had highlighted the need to “shine a light on the challenges that women who want to set up a business face”.

One in eight women wants to start their own business in the UK. Mr Jenrick told The Telegraph that helping more to access the capital they need presented “a massive economic opportunity”.

“The greatest economic opportunity out there today is harnessing the talents of women that are currently untapped,” he said. Mr Jenrick said the Treasury had instructed the British Business Bank – the Government-owned business development bank which works to support small businesses – to review evidence that women are restricted in their access to funding in this country. He said: “We propose today that later in the year, armed with the evidence from the British Business Bank, we will put as much of that as possible into the public domain and use that as a call to arms for female entrepreneurs, and for everyone else in the banking and venture capital sector to sit up, take notice and to act.

“This isn’t just a women’s problem, it’s a problem for everyone.”

An exclusive Telegraph poll revealed yesterday that two thirds of female business owners find they are not taken seriously by investors and banks when trying to secure funding.

In a poll of 750 female business founders conducted by Censuswide,

65 per cent said they had been unfairly treated by financial services when trying to raise funding. It came as all around the world women mobilised to mark International Women’s Day. In Spain, 5.3million women went on an unprecedented strike to call for equality in the workplace and at home. Dubbed the “feminist strike”, picket lines appeared across the country.

Meanwhile in Paris, Emmanuel Macron pledged to “name and shame” companies that pay women less than men for the same work. In London, BBC staff gathered outside Broadcasting House to call for equal pay.

In Germany, Angela Merkel released a video saying women should not rest on their laurels.

You would be forgiven for thinking that women only get a raw deal in life. It was International Women’s Day yesterday, but there are days where the headlines seem to focus solely on the downsides of being female: gender inequality, sexual discrimination, domestic abuse. All these things happen and absolutely must be addressed. But we need to ensure that we don’t overlook the positive, joyful aspects of womanhood.

And there’s a lot to celebrate, particularly in the field of female entrepreneurship, the subject of the Daily Telegraph’s new campaign.

One of the things I love about the technology industry, in which my firm operates, is that there isn’t a single version of the women who work in it. And that’s always been the case.

Just look at Hedy Lamarr in the Forties: she was a Hollywood superstar, but also a prolific inventor who spent time tinkering in her proverbial garden shed, before donning a ballgown and swanning off to glitzy red carpet events.

That narrative continues today, with even more women continuing to bring exciting ideas to the field of technology. There’s Leanne Kemp at Everledger, who is using blockchain to trace diamonds, which helps reduce fraud and ensures that they are validated in a transparent way. And Arlan Hamilton from Backstage Capital, a fund dedicated to investing in high-potential founders from minority backgrounds. And Julia Salasky, a former lawyer who set up Crowdjustice, a crowdfunding platform for those who want to take legal cases forward but can’t afford to.

If we want more women to start companies, we need to share stories like these, and change the narrative about women’s place in society and the impact they can have. It makes good business sense to do so. Women are just as much consumers of products as men – and so ensure the technology we create is tuned into society.

Take Apple’s health app. Launched in 2014 with all sorts of niche health data options, it took a year for the company to add a period tracker, one of the easiest ways for women to gauge their reproductive health.

I don’t think the omission was deliberate, but the answer, surely, is to ensure that your research team represents the actual population – who, after all, you hope will buy your products.

And while we’re at it, why don’t we get away from stereotypically assigning qualities to men and women. Instead, we should go back to the Renaissance idea: you can be an inventor, or mathematician as well as an artist. While a software engineer does need to have strong logical and problemsolving skills, they also need to be creative, to work well with other people and to communicate successfully.

Those skills that we stereotypically assign to women, or think are “boy things” need revisiting, as in many cases, we’re just not doing anyone, regardless of gender, any favours by thinking in those narrowminded ways. My father was a doctor and my mother trained as a tailor and is also a musician – but while I loved making waistcoats for my Barbie dolls, I also loved building cars out of Meccano and building radios with a science kit.

Lots of women are like that – we need to recognise, celebrate and encourage it.

We live in an amazing, exciting, ever-changing world, which is progressing like never before. Women are a huge part of that.

So let’s celebrate!