Host 

Philippa Lamb 

Guests 

• Tanuvi Ethunandan, entrepreneur and product manager 
• Helen Burnell, Partner, Shoosmiths 
• Suzi Gillespie, Head of Research, British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association 

Philippa Lamb: Hello and welcome to Behind the Numbers – I’m Philippa Lamb. Today we are discussing gender inequality in investment. Women continue to be severely underrepresented at senior levels in the venture cap sector, and according to a government report, the scales are even less balanced for female founders, who received a paltry 2% of venture capital funding in 2022. As the new government puts productivity and growth at the top of the national agenda, female entrepreneurs and women-led teams remain an untapped source of innovation and wealth creation. So how do we get things moving?

Tanuvi Ethunandan: It’s understanding that founders are doing their best. They’ve normally put everything on the line – personally, financially – into this business; that is what they’re working on. And I think investors need to be their partner.

Helen Burnell: Women tend to get asked closed end questions – so, why didn’t this succeed? Why haven’t you done that? Whereas we ask men more promotional-based questions – so, where do you see yourself in five years’ time? What would you say your greatest success is? So I think that arming founders with that knowledge is really helpful.

Suzi Gillespie: We’ve talked a lot about venture capital as if it’s the be all and end all for founders, and it’s not. There are many other sources of finance depending on the founder’s ambitions and the state of the company. Different sources of finance like back landing or VC or angel investment, might be suitable at a particular time

PL: With me to come up with some of the answers is an old friend of the podcast, chartered accountant and tech founder Tanuvi Ethanandan. Helen Burnell is also with us – she’s a partner and venture capital expert at Shoosmiths, where she leads on their spHERe network supporting female founders and venture capitalists. And bringing us the latest evidence-based analysis of trends inside the VC sector, we have Suzi Gillespie, Head of Research at the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA). Hello, everyone. Thanks for being with us.

Helen, back in 2023 we had the Rose Review of female entrepreneurship – this is Alison Rose of NatWest Group. She concluded that unrealised potential in this sector could add £250bn of new value to the economy. She said, you know, here we are with the start-up capital of Europe, but access to capital is still the biggest barrier. Is that still the case, now I take it?

HB: Unfortunately it is. So the 2% threshold has been hovering there or thereabouts over the last few years. I think that it’s progressed from the 1% that we saw three or four years ago when the Rose Review first started. But unfortunately, given the amazing initiatives that we’ll come on to talk about this podcast, that number still isn’t trending upwards. In fact, I think that last year we didn’t have an update to the Rose Review, because it’s changed forms and is being reiterated. But the number, I’m assuming, might go slightly down; you know, there are different measures that track it, from 1.6% to 2% but the 2% is universal across the US and across Europe as well. So unfortunately, it’s not changing.

And I think that you have to set that in a context of where, for example, the data we’ve got from the Gender Index, which is an amazing benchmark of female entrepreneurship, is showing more than a million women have now started businesses – I think we crossed that threshold this week. More than a million women have started businesses in the UK. So that’s only around 20% of businesses in the in the UK are led by women. So you’ve got to set it in a threshold that 2% of venture capital funds are going to women-led businesses, women are starting businesses at a faster rate than ever before, we’re doing more in business – but we’re not getting the same access to capital.

PL: Now, we’re going to dig into the reasons for that shortly. But Suzi, last year your own organisation, the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, published research on diversity inclusion among people working in this sector. I mean, rightly or wrongly, the saying goes, women fund women. Are there enough women working in venture cap?

SG: Let’s start with the positive – it shows an improvement. But less positive is that it’s from a very low base. At senior levels within investment teams – so these are the individuals who are deciding what businesses to back – only 6% of senior individuals were female in 2018; there was 10% in 2021, and 12% by 2023. So we’re going in the right direction, and we’re also encouraged by the increase in female representation at the mid and junior levels. In our latest study, women made up 24% of all investment professionals, up from the mid-teens in 2018, and at the junior levels women are now over a third – nearly 40% – of the workforce, which bodes well for the future if they stay in the industry.

PL: But as you say, it’s rather suggesting they’re not. So the pipeline is looking good – 37% of juniors are women. But at the top end, they’re not making it to these senior roles. Are they leaving the sector, or are they just not getting promoted?

SG: A bit of both, to be honest. We did, alongside the data part of our report, we had a series of industry focus groups under Chatham House rules – because people are then willing to be a bit more forthcoming about, you know, their personal experiences. And off the back of that, we made a series of recommendation across the themes of data, recruitment, retention and culture. I was going to pick up on the last two of those to come back and answer your question. There’s a key, I think, at whatever level you are in the firm, about, do you feel included? Do you feel welcome? So people used to talk about D&I a lot – it’s now DEI – so, diversity, inclusion – diversity, equity and inclusion. And I think the ‘I’ is really important. Do people feel welcome? Do they feel it’s a place for them? And that comes down to the tone at the top and the culture, and let’s be honest, venture capital, working as an investor, it’s a really interesting job, but it’s also a tough job, and it isn’t for everyone, male or female. So there is a reasonable dropout rate, you know, wherever your background, but it’s more for women, as we can see from the funnel being broader than it was at the bottom and now still quite, you know, pointy at the top.

PL: Were you able to drill down to exactly why women didn’t want to stay?

SG: I guess there’s two points, when there are bigger drop-offs. One is when people have been in it a few years – one to two years – and they’re like, look, this is really just not for me. I’m not getting fair allocation of work; I’m not being put on the interesting deals; I’m not getting the recognition I deserve – so I’m sorry, I’m going to do something else. The second point is the drop-off from mid to senior. And this typically happens when people are in their 30s, mid-30s, they may be thinking about starting families, and particularly if they do start a family, and they have to take some time out, it can be very difficult to come back. You know, what happens to the compensation structures? When they’re away, what happens to their pipeline? It’s difficult to get right, but it can be got right, and that will really encourage women to stay. And some of the policies and stuff that help women, help everyone, you know; having a good parental leave policy, for example, and making sure that’s not just a piece of paper, but that everyone abides by it. Men and women taking some time out, I think, is beneficial.

A little anecdote, if I may, that came up from the focus groups, was about one of the senior partners, when a junior had suggested he might want to have a sabbatical or, you know, go and have a secondment at a portfolio company. This is a while back. And he said, oh but you can’t possibly take three months out. At which point, I think someone looked around and said: “So that rules out all women progressing.” Because if you have a child, or women who would consider or are wanting to have children, most women would take at least three months’ maternity leave. That partner was unwittingly effectively saying, you have to be in it to win it. You have to constantly stay in the industry and can’t possibly have a break.

PL: Helen, it seems to me, in the legal profession, these issues used to be really at the forefront there for women. But my understanding is that a lot of progress has been made in terms of retaining women through maternity leave, or whatever it might be, and moving them on to senior roles. Would your understanding be, Helen, that there’s still a lot of that work to do in the venture cap sector?

HB: I think so. I think that, you know, in law, we’ve seen that most of the entrants into law are female and have been majority female over the last couple of years. Obviously, that has then created a pipeline of more women coming through the ranks. And again, I think that it’s really internally looking at what the legal sector has done to encourage women to stay in and also make sure that we don’t have that mass exodus just before partner level. But still the number of women, and I think women ownership – so women partners, female partners, just not salary partners – in law is low. You know, we’re not still at 50%, we’re edging up to that 30-40, but we’re not at that 50% parity. And I think if you’re looking at the data within VCs as well, if you’re looking at the general partners – so, ownership, who owns the VCs behind the funding – again, I think we’re only about a quarter [in percentage terms] towards females, and that’s a kind of best-case scenario. So I think it’s a pipeline throughout but then you’ve also got not just having women in key decision-making roles as general partners or VCs, but then also being represented on investment committees and then again in the make-up of LPs. So we need gender parity throughout each key area, not just on the number of women coming in and then being in more junior analyst roles.

SG: Just to build on that, Helen, we alternate the terms of our diversity study; we alternate each year. So while in 2023 we looked at general partners – for those not familiar with general partners or GPs, we’re not talking about doctors here; we’re talking about investors who are giving money to companies – then in contrast, on the alternate years, we look at LPs or limited partners. For example, they are people like pension schemes, banks, insurers, who the large capital providers, or in some cases family offices, would give money to the general partners to invest. And we did our first study looking at limited women and limited partners last year, and that came out earlier this year. We only looked at investment teams, because – let’s put this way, a pension scheme’s got lots of people doing lots of different things, so we really narrowed it down to private capital investment teams, and we found they’re a bit better than the general partners. Just over 20% – so 21% – of senior investment professionals were women and 28% of the overall limited partner investment team workforce. So I think Helen’s point is super valid: you need to work across the whole ecosystem, and some bits are better than others, but none of it’s perfect.

PL: Well, Tanuvi, I would like to hear your experience. You have navigated this territory: you ran your start-up Data Duopoly for five years – a bit more than five years; you led it through a successful round of funding. How was it for you?

TE: I think it certainly is a challenge, and that irrespective of gender, that raising capital, especially in the current climate, is no easy feat. That being said, I think that access to networks and opportunities to meet potential investors is a really key differentiator. Having a company that was based down in Cornwall, being a regional fund, we naturally sought angel investors in the region, and I would say there was a really collaborative atmosphere based around that. And we were fortunate to have private investment from the European Space Agency as our anchor.

Going forward, I’ve now sold the technology, and I work as a product manager at a firm, an AI firm, called Hertzian in Truro. And a key recurring theme is when you go to pitch at these events for capital, while there isn’t obvious prejudice or bias – which is fantastic to see – typically, I was the only female founder in the room. And that is something that can’t be changed, and it is something quite visual and apparent, and I would love for that to change, because I think that would make it a lot more inclusive and collaborative and actually encourage more female investors to attend these events and actually raise capital from different networks that they might not otherwise be exposed to.

PL: Female founders have said to me more than once that it’s the network events, after these formal events, where the real business of getting to know each other and forming real networks is done, and that accessing those is perhaps particularly hard for women.

TE: Yes, I think there’s a great example: I’ll talk about the Slush event in Helsinki, which is probably in everyone’s diary if they’re working in VC or early-stage start-ups or even scale-ups. What I would say is that’s a fantastic event, but the real networking happens in the after-parties, which tend to be invite-only. And one of the really successful programmes I went through was with Innovate UK and Creative UK, where they actually brought together founders and help get access to these exclusive events. And there needs to be more programmes like this, focused maybe around female founders or underrepresented founders, to really widen the access for talent. And I think that’s a key thing that needs to be focused on by government and by also, maybe, institutions – by expanding their reach when they’re having such events at these networking events.

PL: So Helen, obviously you have a lot of experience advising founders, handholding through funding rounds. Tanuvi was successful in raising the investment she needed. Is it your sense that for female founders the experience is often different for them in attempting to do that than for their male counterparts, for some of the reasons that Tanuvi has described?

HB: I think it’s a very typical experience. And you’ve done amazingly well to achieve scale and exit. And I think that having more stories of successful female founders is really important as well, and hearing those success stories. I think it is typical. I would say there is so much in this. And I think we could all go on to talk about this for hours. I think in the UK ecosystem, it’s quite a different kind of background. I think we still can refer to it as old boys’ at work sometimes. And I think that there’s a number of things in that. I think it is changing. There are some amazing initiatives through diversity, VC, etc, when we’re just talking about gender here. But again, cross representation is really important. So I think that, you know, if you’re looking a typical UK VCs, it tends to be that more people within the VC sector come from a financial institution or consultancy background, whereas maybe in the US, you’ve got more people who are from an operational, entrepreneurial background. I think that the challenges that women face when they come to raise is that there’s a lot around unconscious bias. I think there’s been a lot of research proving the type of questions that female founders get asked rather than their male counterparts. You know, [there’s research] from the London School of Economics and these articles have been published in the Harvard business reports, etc. They have shown that women tend to get asked closed-end questions: so, why didn’t this succeed? Why haven’t you done that? Whereas we ask men more promotional-based questions: so, where do you see yourself in five years’ time? What would you say your greatest success is? So I think that arming founders with that knowledge is really helpful, because again, if they get a closed-end question, they can quickly flip it into an open-end, promotional-based question. But I think we’ve all got to tackle that kind of unconscious bias. And this goes back to lots of other topics about trusting women in finance and financial education when it comes to women, because I think sometimes we think that women are more reserved or less risk-aware, and I think the data also shows that’s just not the case.

PL: It’s interesting what you say about the States and the fact that people come into the profession perhaps at a later stage. Why doesn’t that happen in the UK, from other sectors?

HB: I don’t think it’s necessarily at a later stage. I think it’s just having more of a – across a wider background, where maybe they have been entrepreneurs themselves, or they have been more in an operational role, rather than coming from a typical kind of finance background, where maybe you haven’t started a business, or you haven’t got that operational experience, you’re more from an institution or being in a consultancy, or a typical finance route, through accountancy or private banks, private equity and then into venture capital.

PL: Suzi, what’s your take on that? Is there a sense that it’s harder for women to do that here; that there’s a more tried and tested, standardised route of entry to the profession?

SG: There is more of a tried and tested route. But on one hand, there’s a small positive here, which is traditionally the consultants and investment banks, etc, were also very male dominated. And they’ve done a lot of work in the past 10 years to try and rebalance that so the individuals coming from that route – while not yet fully gender balanced – it is more gender balanced than it was. I also think that one of the reasons we have more founders as VCs in the US is just because it’s a more mature ecosystem, and you’ve had more founders who have successfully created businesses and exited, and therefore there’s more of them who wish to do that. That said, you know, at the BVCA, we do see a lot of first-time funds which are effectively seeded with exit money from a unicorn, exit money. And those founders are now like, look, I want to give back to the ecosystem. I want to invest my money. I want to back the next big thing. They will have a different perspective on investing and ask different questions than if you’re someone who’s, you know, come up from a Big Four background, perhaps.

PL: Is it possible, Suzi, to enter the profession in the UK from a different profession at a later stage in your career, when you bring skills and experiences that are useful but not directly drawn from the from the sector? Does that happen?

SG: Yes, it happens. It’s not that frequent, but it happens. And I think there is more openness.

PL: Would it be a good thing, do you feel?

SG: I think so. Yes, I think there is much more openness and much more recognition that there is a wider skill set that is needed, not purely just financial analysis, but, you know, maybe understanding marketing, maybe thinking about, how do you scale a product, etc. And this then comes down to what the VC is trying to achieve. Are they simply providing funding, which is obviously key part of their role, or are they going in providing more strategic advice? Are they giving access to networks? Is it a combination of the above? And different VC firms will operate in different ways. So coming back to the question of whether you can join the profession at maybe, further on in your career? Yes, absolutely. But investing is often seen as a bit of an apprenticeship game. So you’re probably unlikely to be joining at a senior level. You’ll probably join at a mid/junior level, even if you’ve got perhaps a decade of experience somewhere else. And then you’ll need to work your way up. That being said, there are increasingly large numbers of roles within non-investment teams which we have not talked about so much, but we do cover that in our 2020 report as well. And those are roles like operations partner – really going in and advising particular firms on how to scale and grow. And that’s where no, you might not have the years of investment expertise, but you have other expertise which is really relevant.

PL: Tanuvi, what do you think? Would that be good? Would it be helpful to see more of that?

TE: Definitely. And I think, having been a founder, you understand the rollercoaster of a journey that it is – that sometimes things just won’t go your way; they’re out of your control. Take the Covid pandemic. I think every founder, at the end of 2019, early 2020, wouldn’t have had that in their business forecast, but suddenly it became the most important risk assessment. So I think it’s understanding that founders are doing their best. They’ve normally put everything on the line – personally, financially – into this business, so that is what they’re working on. And I think investors need to be their partner. The capital allows them to achieve their vision. It shouldn’t be a hindrance of extra regulation or excess board reporting. Board members and advisers really need to help and support the founder.

And I think there’s some really good examples of that when founders, and as Suzi was mentioning, actually go into investing firms and are actually that operational partner, they’re there to be that founder’s friend, to balance ideas, to be that challenging friend – to think: have you thought about the strategy? How can you do this better? Potentially learning from other companies in the portfolio. And I think investors that bring their founder portfolio together can be really successful, because learning from other founders – many being first-time founders – that is invaluable. And that’s the extra value-add that VCs and investors can bring outside just the capital. Those introductions don’t necessarily need to be: “Here’s someone who’s going to buy your product and become a customer.” It might be: “Here’s someone who’s done this in a different industry. Can you learn any insights from them and then adapt that to your own business?” I think that’s so important, and sometimes not actually mentioned in the UK ecosystem. But when I’ve been to international events, that’s what foreign investors really try and sell to founders, that this is what we can bring. The capital’s almost an afterthought. It’s the network we bring, it’s the opportunities we bring. That’s why you want to be our portfolio company.

PL: Interesting. Helen, you’re nodding.

HB: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think where I’ve had the absolute pleasure of seeing companies that we’ve worked with start from being really, really small – just being three or four founders – and then successfully exit, is where those VCs have really come on board as an early-stage partnership. And they’ve been there; they’ve been an extension to the team. You know, if they do well, the company does well; everybody wins. I think, whether it’s advising who your next chair should be, or opening up those networks on board advisory roles, that’s really important as to who you’ve got sitting around your table when you’re making important decisions. So I think that’s really, really, really sound advice and really important.

PL: There are a lot of initiatives, aren’t there, that have sprung up to assist in this area. You have your own, don’t you – sphere at Shoosmiths? Do you want to tell us a bit about how that works?

HB: Yeah. So we started back in 2019 and basically I was going to a lot of females-only events where a lot of our clients, at the time being all-male investment teams, weren’t there. So spHERe really started by us joining the dots and putting everybody in the same room and really talking about not just the gender angle of it, but what they were seeing in the market and typical raises and things like that. So spHERe has been through networking, but through us partnering with multiple different organisations. So for example, as I said, we were very proud sponsors of The Gender Index, working with lots of amazing initiatives across the space who were all doing different things. A lot of what we do is early-stage mentoring. So we work with a lot of accelerators, whether it’s demystifying term sheets or doing that hand-holding, or, again, just seeing who we can introduce because it might be that, you know, we speak to a founder at an early stage, and we know the perfect VC. It might not be that they’re raising with them now, but having those future connections. And again, I don’t know any VC that we don’t work with, who wouldn’t sit down with a founder, or who hasn’t guided or prompted or helped. I

PL: I was looking, when I was researching for this podcast, I was looking at the list of initiatives that I could just come up with by just Googling something, and there are a lot, aren’t there? I mean, there’s the Investing in Women Code, there’s the Invest in Women Taskforce, or the Invest in Women Hub. There’s a whole bunch of things. I’m interested Tanuvi, in your take. I mean, are there too many? Do they work?

TE: I think there’s a plethora out there. And I think as a founder, to navigate which one’s relevant to yourself is a real challenge. And that’s where founder group WhatsApps can be absolutely fantastic. You know, recommendations from other founders, and I think that’s what you trust the most. I’ve been fortunate to work through quite a few programmes, you know; I think my alma mater, the Judge Business School, had a fantastic accelerate programme. And what was really unique about it was they had a combined programme, but there was a female founders WhatsApp group, and I’m still part of that today. And everyone was supporting each other, and giving reviews of VCs as well; investors saying, you know, I pitched to them and I wasn’t the right fit. But this is what you could mention. This is what they’re looking for. Anyone in climate tech? I don’t have an investor. And I think that’s how women, underrepresented founders, can actually get their edge back.

There is a problem in that, in itself. Those are invite-only WhatsApp groups, potentially perpetuating the problem. However, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s [asking] how do you widen access? Another programme I just wanted to say was Innovate UK; the UK’s main body for issuing capital has an investor partnership programme. And as a founder, I think I was so excited to see this. Effectively, it was going to be 50% match funding for your new investment round if you satisfied certain criteria. However, the administration of it didn’t quite line up. You actually had to get an investor on board to give an expression of interest or letter of intent to invest, which most VCs will not provide easily. They’d rather you have a term sheet, but at that point you’ve completed your round. So it’s almost a top-up to companies that were already raising rather than actually a leg-up for founders who might be having innovative technology and wanted to reduce the risk to VCs. And I think that’s where maybe governmental programmes have a really good objective, but the way they’re delivered don’t match the founder lifecycle – that reimbursement of grants rather than the cash flow upfront. You know, those are all key challenges that founders are navigating, and I think that improvement and can be made.

PL: That’s really interesting. Suzi, do you think there could perhaps be a bit of consolidation in that sector of all the well-meaning initiatives, that are a bit overwhelming and confusing for founders.

SG: Certainly, I think there’s a balance to be struck between, you know, all the really exciting ideas and initiatives and people going, “I want to do something,” and setting up their own thing, along with, you know, comparing that with, well, the fact that there’s a lot of people who are setting up their own thing. One thing that I would want to give a little plug for is the Invest in Women Hub, a resource which, in theory, at least, should list out every initiative that’s on there. And it’s a resource for founders, more for founders than investors, but for founders to go and say, OK, there’s this event, there’s this pitch process, go here. So if you’re listening and you’ve got one of those, and you’re not on the Invest in Women Hub, it’s free advertising, so please get in touch with them, and they’ll very happily list out the events. Because the idea is to make that, as much as possible – although it never will be – a one-stop shop for where people go to find stuff. There’s still going to be a challenge of navigating it, as Tanuvi said – finding the right one for you; but at least if you’ve got a decent list of things that you can look at, filter by region, etc, I think that’s going to be super helpful.

HB: I think just to add to that, I think that also it’s not just about VCs. It’s about different elements of capital, whether it’s banks financing funding, or whether it’s early-stage angel investing, etc. I think that the Invest in Women Hub really is that kind of one go-to shop to be able to find the resources that you need.

SG: Which is really important, because we’ve kind of talked a lot about this. We’ve talked a lot about venture capital as if it’s the be all and end all for founders, and it’s not; there are many other sources of finance and, depending on the founder’s ambitions and the state of the company, different sources of finance, like bank lending or VC or angel investment, might be suitable at a particular time. So much as I do represent the venture capital industry, I would encourage all founders to go: what is right for me? What is right for my business at this particular point in time?

PL: Yeah, as Tanuvi discovered herself. But it’s a big subject, as we said, isn’t it? But you mentioned government, Helen, and I’m interested. Government is talking about productivity and growth as the foundation stone of everything they want to achieve. This clearly plays directly into that. What would you all like to see from government?

HB: I think you started with the £250bn that could be added to the UK economy if women-led businesses scaled at the same rate as their male accounts. That’s akin to four years’ growth. I think we could all do with that at the moment. I think also the financial research showing that women-led businesses tend to be more profitable. Gender-balanced businesses also tend to outperform one-only gender-led teams. So I think there’s a lot of financial research backing and showing that it makes economic sense to back diverse businesses. I think that the Investing in Women Code, which was an initiative coming out of the Alison Rose review, has been brilliant. I think we’ve now got over 240 signatories to that Investing in Women Code. And I think that the data captured on an annual basis has been the stepping stone to gather that data and start using it and benchmarking it year on year, about how we’re doing. And again, that’s not just venture capital. There are lots of different signatories to it from across the banks, etc. I think, as Suzi touched on earlier, I think that getting LPs signing up to that is really critical, and having that transparency across limited partner data is really important. And there is some amazing research which has gone into that in the last couple of years, whether it’s through their ADA Ventures report, etc. I think that while we’ve got lots of signatories signing up to it, that 2% isn’t moving. So I think that where we need to evolve as an ecosystem is to what we can do tangibly to get that 2% up. So in terms of what does best practice look across? Like across the venture capital system. What are those VCs that are getting higher returns and investing more into women-led businesses doing? What kind of analysis are they doing of their own portfolio? What decision-making process are they doing? How are they tackling unconscious bias internally? So I think that there’s a lot more we can be pushing to help support people, whether it’s venture capitals, larger VCs or smaller across the ecosystem, to progress things.

PL: So a lot of work to be done internally in organisations right across the sector. I mean, an obvious role for government seems to be, might be, amplification of everything we’ve talking about, if nothing else, today. Because, as you’ve all said, this data – it’s there, it speaks for itself. But how widely it’s understood is another question, isn’t it? Suzi, what would you like to see government do to move this forward?

SG: Well, I think it’s great that we now have a female chancellor, and I know it’s slightly sidestepping the question, but it’s hard to be the change that you can’t see. And even just yesterday, Rachel Reeves was saying that she’s going to use her platform as the UK’s first woman chancellor in however many hundreds of years – since whenever we first had it, whenever we had a chancellor – she’s going to use that as a bit of a platform to champion imports of female leadership in economics and finance. And she’s meeting, you know, the other female leaders, the G20 this week. I think that’s going to be really, really valuable. I mean, I remember when I was growing up, we had Maggie Thatcher as a prime minister, and whatever you thought of her politics, as a kid, I was like, oh, a woman could be prime minister. That’s good. I mean, not that I personally ever wanted to be prime minister. It’s a bit of a tough job, bit of a tough gig. But having that, you know. The fact a woman is doing that job, it’s a tough job. A woman’s doing that job. And who knows, we may yet have Kamala Harris, who knows what’s going to happen in the States?

I mean, just building on that, then bringing it back to female founders, I think one thing that we really should do more of is to celebrate success, because there are female founders, and we should talk about them, and they do successfully start businesses, grow businesses, exit businesses. And the more that we can have events, or whatever, where we have people in the room like Tanuvi, so we don’t have the situation when you walk in and you’re the only woman, and you’re going, oh, even if everyone’s welcoming, am I in the right place? One of the things, one of the reviews that we completed earlier this year, was the task force that was led by Anne Boden into women-led high growth enterprises, and that had a series of recommendations coming out of that, one of which was to celebrate success and to effectively have an inspirational women’s leader award. So the BVCA has been really pleased to take that on, champion that, and we’ll be presenting the inaugural award at our summit, which is one of our major conferences on the 12th September. So I, for one, I’m very much looking forward to hearing some of the great stories about women who’ve gone in, built businesses, grown businesses, exited it, and be able to provide advice and mentoring for others on that as they’re coming through.

PL: Tanuvi, final thought?

TE: I think for me, I echo what’s been said by Helen and Suzi, but I think from the founder perspective, the key thing is to listen to founders on what they need. It’s all very well sort of implementing these fantastic governmental strategies. But if they don’t actually work for the founder, the execution isn’t there, then they won’t be used and they won’t make that tangible impact. It’s not only about putting capital behind it, it’s about their delivery. And I also think a really important thing to touch on is, there’s a lot of city-centric focus, but actually there’s a lot of talent in the South West. My business was based in Cornwall, and I’m still based in the South West, but it’s a growing hub of technology advancement and innovation, and it feels like it’s been left behind. And I think it’s really important that that knowledge, that showcase, is spread out across the whole of the United Kingdom, and I think that’s where it’s really going to drive growth, drive talent, and actually improve access to opportunities all throughout the UK, which is going to help our economic objectives.

PL: Suzi, Helen, Tanuvi, thanks very much for joining us. We will keep a watching brief on this one. Behind the Numbers will be back in late August. Before then join us for a new episode of Accountancy Insights, covering the top stories for accountancy professionals from right across ICAEW and the sector. Finally, a reminder that listening to these podcasts counts towards your CPD – and a small tip: if you listen on the ICAEW website, rather than your phone app, you can just click the Add CPD tool for each episode as you listen to it; it could not be easier. Thanks for being with us today.