The money still isn't going to women
In 2024, I stood on the WebSummit stage and talked about the funding gap facing female founders. The stats were grim then. Two years on, ahead of International Women's Day this weekend, I've been sitting with a harder question: have things actually changed?
Last week I was at the launch of The Rise Report - a brand new nationwide study of 2,225 UK female founders, commissioned by Female Founders Rise in partnership with Barclays. It's one of the largest grassroots studies of its kind. And while it's full of evidence of brilliant women building brilliant things, it's also pretty unflinching about where we still are.
You can watch my full talk from 2024 and if you want to see where the conversation has got to since then, I've also shared a video from last week's Rise Report launch on my Instagram.
Because the most useful thing we can do with a moment like IWD isn't to help ourselves to a pink cupcake in the office canteen, celebrate how far we've come, and call it done. The stats don't move by themselves. They move when founders keep pushing - and when the leaders with the power to change things decide to use it.
Where we actually are in 2026.
The conversations are better. The ecosystem is growing - more female angels, more female-founded funds, more communities built specifically to support women through the process. And yet just 2% of VC still goes to fully female-founded teams. Which means somewhere between the good intentions and the growing ecosystem, the money is still going somewhere else. Someone is still making that call. In a lot of organisations, that someone is in a leadership meeting right now.
So here's what I want to say directly to the leadership teams and corporates reading this.
This isn't just a founder problem. It's yours too.
And I don't mean that as a guilt trip. I mean it as a genuine invitation - because the leaders I work with who are doing this well aren't doing it because they feel they should. They're doing it because they've realised the cost of not doing it.
Think about the last time someone brilliant left your organisation. Or the last hire that didn't work out. Or the last strategy that felt stale because the same people kept making the same calls. The gender gap in leadership isn't just an equity issue - it's a talent drain, a creativity drain, and increasingly, a commercial one.
The numbers back this up. Companies with gender-diverse leadership consistently outperform those without. Female-founded companies generate more revenue per pound of funding than their male counterparts. And yet the gap between knowing this and doing something about it remains stubbornly wide - because knowing is easy, and doing requires something more deliberate.
So what does deliberate actually look like? It's not the IWD post. It's not the unconscious bias training you ran in 2019 and haven't revisited since. It looks like this:
It's checking who's actually in the room when budget decisions get made - not who should be in theory, but who is in practice. It's the difference between mentoring a woman through what she should do next and sponsoring her - putting your name and reputation behind her advancement in the rooms she's not in yet. It's looking at your procurement decisions and asking whether you're actively choosing to spend money with female-founded businesses when the option exists. It's asking your team not just "are we diverse?" but "are we equitable?" - because you can have a diverse team and still have the same people making all the calls.
None of this is complicated. Most of it costs nothing except intention. And on a week when everyone's posting about International Women's Day, intention is exactly what separates the organisations that are genuinely shifting things from the ones that are just making noise about it.
Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity still isn't. And that gap doesn't close by accident - it closes when the people with power decide to do something deliberate about it.
Cheat sheet
What this moment actually asks of us - founders and leaders alike
Know the stats. Then go beyond them.
The numbers are grim but they're useful. Whether you're a founder navigating a biased system or a leader making decisions within one - understanding where the gaps are is the first step to doing something about them. Ignorance stopped being an excuse a long time ago.
Leaders: audit your own rooms.
Who's in your investment committee? Who's being put forward for the big opportunities? Who gets the benefit of the doubt when they're not the loudest person in the room? If the answer is consistently the same kind of person, that's not a pipeline problem. That's a decision problem.
Make the business case internally (and loudly).
Gender-diverse leadership outperforms. Female-founded companies generate more revenue per dollar invested. If you're in a corporate and you're not backing women, you're leaving performance on the table. Use that language. It opens doors that "it's the right thing to do" sometimes doesn't.
Sponsor, don't just mentor.
Mentoring tells someone what to do. Sponsorship puts your name behind them. The women in your organisation who are ready for the next level don't need more advice - they need someone with influence to say "she's ready" in the rooms they're not in yet.
Don't pull up the ladder.
Whether you're a founder who's raised or a leader who's succeeded - the ecosystem grows when you bring others with you. Make the introductions. Take the coffees. Treat your access like something to share, not protect. If you exit, invest. If you lead, sponsor.