Event round-up: Female Entrepreneurship: The Case for the Tech Sector
On Monday 7 July, techUK partnered with the Invest in Women Taskforce held a roundtable focused on the topic of female entrepreneurship and the case for the Tech Sector. This event brought together over 20 women founders, leaders, and government stakeholders.
The key action point? A stocktake on government, and industry, action to better support female and diverse founders and leaders into the tech sector.
This comes at a crucial time when the Women and Equalities Committee continue their inquiry into female entrepreneurship and how to tackle the funding gap.
Hosted by techUK’s Nicola Hodson, Vice-President and Chair of IBM UK&I, along with Juliet Gouldman, Head of Stakeholder Engagement at Barclays, Invest in Women Taskforce.
Urgency to act but a willingness to work together to do so…
The roundtable opened with sobering statistics that underscored the urgency of the discussion.
Female participation in tech entrepreneurship remains critically low, with women receiving only 2% of equity investment despite the potential for a £250bn GDP contribution from increased female economic participation.
The Invest in Women Taskforce, backed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and with over £250 million of funding, has been created to bridge the funding gap and support women at every stage of their business, from start-up to scale-up.
The educational pipeline shows equally concerning trends, with only 5-10% of women studying computer science.
Alongside this, university spin-outs reveal a stark disparity: 75% are all-male teams while only 9% are female-led.
Central themes and challenges ranged from education to data metrics…
Educational foundation and early intervention
Participants emphasised that gender separation begins early in the education system, affecting everything from PE classes to GCSE course selection. The lack of female role models and mentorship programs creates a pipeline problem that extends into entrepreneurship.
Companies bear responsibility for actively recruiting women in STEM fields, yet, anecdotally, schools can often show little interest in technical exposure opportunities like data centre tours.
Capital access and investment bias
The investment landscape presents significant barriers beyond just funding availability. Even within female-focused sectors like femtech, male-led companies receive double the investment of female-founded firms. Investors demonstrate unconscious bias, asking women about risk management while questioning men about visionary aspects. The need for more female representation on the investor side and male allies to shift cultural attitudes emerged as critical factors.
Some strategic solutions proposed, with an emphasis on action…
Government procurement as a lever for change: Participants identified strategic procurement as a powerful tool for driving change. By incorporating supplier diversity goals and investing in women as part of social value mandates (typically 10% of procurement decisions), government spending could actively support female entrepreneurship.
Could we look at the existing schemes, using them to better support female and women entrepreneurs? Suggestions included modifying existing tax incentives like EIS and SEIS schemes, potentially adjusting age limits and caps to better support women and diverse founders who may enter entrepreneurship at different life stages.
Community building and better plugging resources: The success of initiatives like ‘Buy Women Built’ demonstrates the power of community platforms. Participants called for a central resource hub to help founders navigate funding options and understand different investment routes, supported by both formal networks and informal channels like WhatsApp groups.
Alternative metrics of ‘success’: Traditional ROI-focused metrics may not capture the full value that female entrepreneurs bring. Participants advocated for success measurements that account for problem-solving impact and different life stages, suggesting that current evaluation methods may systematically undervalue women-led ventures.
Better childcare support to tackle societal challenges: Practical challenges like childcare support and the lack of statutory maternity pay for entrepreneurs create additional hurdles that disproportionately affect women in the startup ecosystem. The government’s role in this was..
The conversation, and action, continues…
The roundtable concluded with concrete next steps and a real buzz in the room. While it was stark to hear the investment and funding gaps, techUK and the Invest in Women Taskforce remain empowered to play a more role facilitating community building and supporting guidance and education on areas like investment. Both organisations committed to continued collaboration on sustained action beyond the initial discussion.
This represents a step to address systemic barriers to female entrepreneurship in tech, combining data-driven insights with practical solutions that span education, investment, and policy domains. The discussion highlighted both the scale of the challenge and the potential for coordinated action across multiple stakeholders to drive meaningful change in the tech entrepreneurship ecosystem.
