Women entrepreneurs in the UK have limited access to funding, face discrimination from investors and struggle to balance work-life responsibilities, according to a new survey.
According to a poll of more than 400 women entrepreneurs, almost three-quarters (70%) said they had faced difficulty accessing funding, saying they had received disproportionately smaller shares of venture capital, grants and loans than their male counterparts.
The study was conducted by Female Founders Rise (FFR), a community of over 9,000 women entrepreneurs, alongside software industry group Boardwave, with the results collected by analytics platform Wholesum. The groups plan to submit the results to the UK government’s parliamentary inquiry into female entrepreneurship, which closes for submissions on Friday.
“I feel like I’m constantly seeing this kind of data, and I don’t want to keep reporting this. I want to see solutions and see things actually happening,” Emmie Faust, a serial entrepreneur and founder of FFR, tells Sifted.
“We need to work out how we can get more funding channeled into women-led businesses,” she added. “We need to look at other ways we can get funding to them, and think about whether we need different funding vehicles, and how we make them accessible.”
Of the 419 members of FFR and Boardwave’s communities surveyed, almost half (49%) said they faced systemic bias and discrimination when seeking funding. One participant told researchers: “I’ve been asked who ‘really’ came up with the idea. I’ve had emails back from VCs telling me that I wasn’t aggressive enough and therefore they couldn’t invest.”
Just under a third (29%) of participants said a lack of networks and mentorship had undermined their success as entrepreneurs.
As part of the report, FFR and Boardwave made a number of recommendations to the UK government on improving conditions for women entrepreneurs. They include: guarantee a proportion of government-backed funding goes to women-led companies; allocating them more government contracts; and set up a similar scheme to one in France, which aims for parity in the tech and finance sectors.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/boardwave-survey-women-tech-vc-startup-uk/
