The Invest in Women Taskforce aims to tackle the vast gender gap in equity finance in the UK. Funding will go towards supporting firms founded by women, or into a specialist ‘Women backing Women’ fund.
The Invest in Women Taskforce has secured £255m (€306m) in funding to support female entrepreneurs, exceeding its initial fundraising goal of £250m, which it had set out when it was founded in March. Barclays, M&G, British Business Bank and Aviva have each committed £50m, with BGF and Morgan Stanley contributing £25m, and Visa Foundation £5m.
The backers will either directly invest in firms founded by women or through a £135m ‘Women backing Women’ fund, which is currently recruiting a fund manager.
The Taskforce aims to address the vast gender gap in equity finance in the UK, where firms founded by women received just 1.8% (£145m) of all equity investments in the first half of this year. That’s a decline of 2.5% compared with the same period last year.
Figures from the Women-led high-growth enterprise taskforce report, published by the UK government in Feb 2024, also paint a stark picture, revealing that for every £1 of equity investment in the UK, just 2p goes to fully female-founded businesses, which means there has been no improvement in funding levels over time.
“Things are getting worse, not better,” said Wosskow, co-chair of the taskforce and a serial entrepreneur. “The standout point, and this has been the point in my whole career, is that women don’t raise money, that the amount of capital going to back a female entrepreneur in the UK is going backwards,” she told Impact Investor.
Building momentum
Since starting her first business at the age of 15, Wosskow has successfully built and exited three companies. These include Love Home Swap, a home exchange website business she founded after watching the movie ‘The Holiday’ and sold in 2017 for $53m (€50m). Wosskow is also the co-founder of AllBright, a global network for women, and has held a range of advisory roles for the UK government.
Only 11% of decision makers in venture capital are female, “so we just haven’t broken through”, said Wosskow. “It takes a movement, and it takes an initiative like this to put money in the hands of female investors.”
“No female entrepreneur has ever said, ‘I’d like more mentoring, please’. We all need funding. I feel really proud to have been part of driving an agenda about something that is real, that I think will drive diversity, growth and economic performance for the country where I live,” she added.
There is a compelling business case for backing female founders, according to Wosskow, who co-chairs the Invest in Women Taskforce with Hannah Bernard, head of business banking at UK lender Barclays.
“If women founded and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, that would bring in an extra £250bn to UK plc,” Wosskow said, citing statistics from the UK government’s Rose Review of female entrepreneurship, where she acted as a board member. “If we ignore the potential of female economic growth, that’s at our peril at a time when we need it.”
Supporting female investors and founders makes “strong commercial sense”, Bernard said, saying that a number of studies show “female-led businesses generate 35% higher returns than male-led businesses”.
Government support
The Invest in Women Taskforce is one of the biggest funding pots of its kind for female-led and mixed businesses. It is backed by Rachel Reeves, Britain’s first female Chancellor, who called the investment pool “a fantastic example of the public and private sectors working together to help unlock the potential of female founders and seize opportunities to fire up the government’s number one mission of economic growth”.
Despite the challenges facing female founders, Wosskow is optimistic about the potential for women-led businesses to generate growth, feeling that the conversation about investing in women is finally “front and centre” for the first time in her life as an entrepreneur.
