Warwickshire leading the way in support for women in business

There is plenty of evidence to show that the economy generally is boosted by a growth in female business ownership.

Despite this, gender-based differences, affecting women’s ability to start and grow their own businesses, remain - but in Warwickshire, support is at hand. Sally Arkley, director of The Women's Economy, explains.

In recent years we have seen an increasing focus on women’s enterprise, whether it has been through business support programmes aimed at women, the seemingly endless proliferation of women’s business networks or a stream of stories in the media. Why is this?

Since the start of the 21st century there has been an increasing realisation that what is good for women’s enterprise is good for the economy as a whole. A host of major international bodies from Goldman Sachs to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have demonstrated the strong link between the growth of female business ownership and a successful economy.

This led to a number of publicly-funded business support initiatives aimed at women which, although they were swept away in public spending cuts since 2010, left their legacy, both in terms of economic impact and by raising the profile of women’s business ownership in general.

Despite this, in the UK, women’s self-employment continues to hover around 26% of the UK total and women-owned companies represent only about 15% of all those recorded at Companies House.

 “UK start-ups would rise by 50% if the start up rate among women matched that of men… if this happened we would close the productivity gap between the UK and the US.” Gordon Brown  as Chancellor of the Exchequer 2006

Whether we want to admit it or not (and many don’t) there are gender-based differences, which affect women’s ability to start and grow their own businesses. These include women’s own risk aversion, their tendency to under-capitalise their businesses through lack of funds, exclusion from traditional business networks and always feeling in a minority if they do join them (the rise and rise of women’s business networks is no coincidence) and the various cultural challenges that face women in diverse communities.

The Women's Economy supports initiatives in the UK designed to tackle these challenges, often with conspicuous success. A government survey (2006) found that for every £1 spent by the treasury on women’s enterprise support, £8 was returned in the form of tax receipts and benefit savings.

These initiatives tend to work in women-only groups and offer a transformational approach to business support, taking into account all factors affecting women’s lives, such as caring responsibilities and cultural pressures, rather than the traditional transactional approach offered by the mainstream. This approach has proved so successful that The Women’s Economy (which operates specifically in Coventry and Warwickshire) has exported its support methodology to four European countries, where it continues to flourish.

That said, many women business owners actively avoid women-focused events and reject the notion that they need anything different from men. It is important to remember that women are not a homogenous group, different women having vastly different needs.

For example, women stuck in the benefits trap or experiencing social isolation as a result of community attitudes experience many challenges (not least as a result of their own lack of confidence) that others with a more straightforward route to business ownership might not.

In Warwickshire, as elsewhere, it is difficult to obtain accurate statistics on the number of women-owned businesses because most organisations do not view the disaggregation of statistics by gender as important enough to track – a real pity. But we know there are thriving women’s business networks even if the actual numbers of women-owned businesses must, we assume, more or less conform to the national average.

Growing women’s business ownership, vital though this is to our economy, is not the only challenge to our region. We keep hearing about the skills shortage, particularly in the new technologies, so vital to our business growth. We also know that girls are not engaged in these technologies in anything like the numbers that boys are. A lot of research is being done on this and it keeps pointing to one thing. The way that we are teaching our girls makes too many of them feel that technology is not ‘for them' - a perception that too many teachers seem to share. This has serious implications for our economic future.