TODAY we mark International Women’s Day (IWD), an annual event which highlights key issues including gender equality, reproductive rights, and violence and abuse against women.
This year’s IWD sits under the theme "DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality", focusing on how to further empower women through technological change and education.
This theme also sits at the heart of the recently published Pathways: A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship report, co-written by successful entrepreneur Ana Stewart and Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur, Mark Logan. It was a privilege for me to contribute to this bold report that challenges the status quo in attracting more women into the world of entrepreneurship and supporting them to scale their businesses on a global level.
The Pathways Report sets out key findings and recommendations aimed at addressing current inequities behind the significant underrepresentation of women entrepreneurs. At present, just one in five businesses in Scotland are led by women. Of even greater concern is that just two per cent of institutional investment currently goes into female-led companies. This level of under-participation and lack of financial accessibility is not only unacceptable but it is also economically damaging.
The report’s recommendations on tackling these chronic problems include a sensible, decentralised approach in bringing start-up incubation, training and support to remote communities and to those female groups in society which are currently most underrepresented.
Read more: Female pioneers can help deal with bias in business
The Scottish Government must embrace all these recommendations, both the quicker-fix policy solutions and the deeper, underlying causes. This includes a stronger focus on female entrepreneurship within the education system and across other areas of society; helping tackle the unconscious bias which inhibits many women from pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities and adversely impacts on growth opportunities for the minority who do set up their own companies.
While encouraging more women into entrepreneurship it’s also critical that we greatly increase support along the journey to growth, scale and investment where the biggest drop-off of female founders currently occurs. Investing Women Angels has significantly grown the numbers of women investors in Scotland leading to a six-fold increase in the percentage of angel investments going into female-led companies. We are therefore excited to see the recommended Journey Fund which will help underpin and accelerate more investment in female founders.
To ensure far more female-led companies scale internationally, we must also build on the work of groups like AccelerateHER, giving female founders access to global investment and market building connections through international trade missions and overseas mentors. The work of CodeBase is also vital in attracting more women entrepreneurs into tech and helping them to scale. These activities are key constituents in delivering economic growth for Scotland.
Through the support of the Scottish Government and many other organisations, we must embrace the recommendations set out in the Pathways Report and address the core issues that are still preventing more female-led businesses from flourishing. Pursuing this course of action will not only help create a fairer society, it will also deliver an economic uplift across Scotland to the benefit of everyone in our society.
Jackie Waring is the founder of Investing Women Angels and Chair of sister company AccelerateHER
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here