ELITE event shines spotlight on gender balance

Of every £1 of venture capital invested in the UK, all-female founder teams currently receive less than 1p. Mixed-gender teams get 10p, while 89p goes to all-male teams. 

This was the background to ‘Female Founders and Future Leaders’, an event held at London Stock Exchange Group’s head office on 15 January. Organised by ELITE, LSEG’s business support and capital raising platform for private companies, it was attended by more than 50 venture capital and private equity investors.

The event featured a panel discussion between three high-achieving female founders: Joan Ingram OBE, Founder and Director of Fifth Business, Virginie Charlès-Dear, Founder and CEO, toucanBox, and Sarah Wood, tech founder, author and former CEO of Unruly.

These inspiring entrepreneurs, all of whom have completed the ELITE programme, provided a wealth of revealing insights into the challenges they had faced as women in setting up and growing their businesses. They also explained how much companies like theirs rely on ‘future leader’ investors to help them realise their full potential.

Higher ratios bringing results

ELITE itself has declared its firm support for positive change in the funding ‘gender balance’ and is backing this up with action. It has signed the Investing in Women Code, recently partnered with Intesa Sanpaolo bank to onboard its first group of businesses wholly based on female entrepreneurship, and has a 50/50 gender split in its own leadership team. 

When it comes to the 1400+ ELITE companies, women now occupy at least 20% of director and manager roles in over half of them. While that is still too low, it is above average – and as was made clear at the event, there is real determination to improve further. 

What’s more, among ELITE companies, a greater proportion of female managers and directors is equating to a higher annual average return on equity (ROE). In firms where women hold 20% or more of these senior roles, the ROE is 21.77%. When the ratio is 25% or more, ROE is 22.77%. And when it is 30% or more, ROE rises to 26.97%. 

Diverse investors, please

Hosted by Kelly Perry, Investor Liaison & Partner Manager at ELITE, ‘Female Founders and Future Leaders’ was staged in association with Level20 and Diversity VC, two not-for-profit organisations promoting gender diversity in the private equity and venture capital worlds respectively.

During the panel discussion and Q&A session, Ingram, Charlès-Dear and Wood highlighted some of their eye-opening experiences when seeking funding as female entrepreneurs. These included potential investors avoiding making eye contact with the females in the room, relating to a female CEO by referencing their own mothers and aunts, and even asking whether they saw their company as a full-time job. 

Investors with such outward bias were quickly discounted, the panel members emphasised. Today’s founding teams increasingly value investors who themselves have a diverse culture – people who, in Wood’s words, “bring a range of experiences into the boardroom”. Which is why, as this event underlined, advocating change in the funding space to promote greater diversity is at the core of ELITE’s mission.