The problem is not only that fewer women start businesses, but that those who do are more likely to operate as solo entrepreneurs
Many women who set up their own companies are solo entrepreneurs.
One of the biggest mistakes in economic policy is assuming entrepreneurship is somehow neutral.
If the right grants, loans, mentoring schemes and business support programmes are in place, everyone will benefit equally, and the market will take care of the rest.
That may be a comforting assumption, but it is not one supported by the evidence, and a recent European Commission report on women entrepreneurs in Europe should be read carefully by policymakers in the UK, not because the UK is now outside the EU, but because the patterns it identifies will be familiar to anyone who has spent time working with founders, start-ups and growing businesses in Wales and across Britain.
The report’s central message is clear: women are not short of talent, ideas or ambition, but they face a business support and finance system that too often fails to account for the realities of how women start, fund, grow and sustain businesses.
In the EU countries covered by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data, 7% of women aged 18 to 64 were involved in early-stage entrepreneurial activity compared with 10% of men.
While that may sound like a modest gap until translated into people, the report estimates this represents around four million “missing” women entrepreneurs.
Indeed, across all entrepreneurs in the EU, women make up only a third of the total, representing a significant structural gap in enterprise creation, business ownership and future wealth generation.
And while the report is European in scope, the implications for the UK are obvious and at a time when we are struggling with weak productivity, low business birth rates in many regions, and an urgent need to build the next generation of growth firms, we simply cannot afford to leave half the population operating at anything less than its full entrepreneurial potential.
The problem is not only that fewer women start businesses, but that those who do are more likely to operate as solo entrepreneurs, more likely to work part-time, more likely to be concentrated in lower-growth sectors, and less likely to be found in the areas of the economy that typically attract investment, generate exports and scale rapidly.
In addition, the report identifies a familiar set of obstacles, such as women being less likely than men to believe they have the skills, knowledge and experience to start a business.
They are also more likely to cite fear of failure as a barrier, face greater constraints around childcare and caring responsibilities, and struggle to access the informal networks through which so much investment, advice and opportunity still flows.
None of these factors operates in isolation but reinforces each other, and if a woman has caring responsibilities she may have less time to attend networking events, investor sessions or accelerator programmes.
If she has less access to those networks, she may have fewer routes to finance and if she has less finance, she may start smaller, hire later and grow more cautiously.
Most importantly, if she sees fewer women building high-growth firms, she may be less likely to imagine that path for herself, especially if the support system treats all founders as if they have the same starting point.
This is why the UK needs to stop treating female entrepreneurship as a narrow equality initiative and start seeing it as a serious economic growth agenda, and too often support for women entrepreneurs is placed in a separate box, disconnected from mainstream debates on productivity, investment, innovation and regional growth.
Yet the under-representation of women in entrepreneurship is directly relevant to all of those issues and in Wales, this should be particularly important.
We have too few businesses per capita, too few high-growth firms, too little private investment, and too many communities where enterprise creation remains weaker than it should be.
Any serious strategy for economic renewal has to ask how we unlock more entrepreneurial talent among women, not as an optional extra, but as a central part of the solution.
First, we must tackle finance properly, and that means more than encouraging women to apply for existing funds.
It means examining lending decisions, investor behaviour, angel networks, public finance products and the extent to which women-led firms are being fairly assessed. It also means creating more routes for women to become investors themselves.
Second, business support must be designed around real lives, and initiatives that assume founders can attend full-day sessions, travel long distances, or participate during standard working hours will exclude many of the very people they claim to support.
Childcare-aware, flexible and hybrid support should be part of mainstream provision, not an afterthought.
Third, we need to be much more ambitious about the sectors in which women are supported to start and grow businesses and AI, digital adoption, exporting, innovation, procurement and access to corporate supply chains should be built into women’s enterprise programmes from the start.
Fourth, role models matter, but they must be broad enough, and we need to see and hear not only from women building local businesses, but also from those raising investment, selling internationally, developing technology, acquiring competitors and scaling teams.
Finally, we need better data as we cannot improve what we do not measure and the UK should be tracking female entrepreneurship by sector, region, age, ethnicity, investment raised, turnover, survival, employment and growth. Without that evidence, policy will keep relying on good intentions rather than hard analysis.
Therefore, if we are serious about building a stronger economy, then supporting female entrepreneurs cannot be treated as a side project, as it is one of the most obvious and underused routes to creating more firms, better jobs, stronger communities and greater prosperity.
And the question is no longer whether we should do more to support women entrepreneurs but why, given the scale of the opportunity, we have waited so long.
