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The Investing in Women Code is a commitment by financial institutions in the UK to improve female entrepreneurs’ access to finance. Launched by the UK government, it aims to address gender disparities in funding by encouraging investors to adopt fairer and more transparent investment practices.
Signatories of the code pledge to ensure their funding decisions are free from bias and must submit yearly reports on their progress and performance in funding female-led enterprises.
As of September 2024, over 250 organisations, including Baltic Ventures, have become signatories to the Investing in Women Code, up from 204 signatories in June 2023. The signatories include a range of investment organisations, including banks such as Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, and Santander; angel syndicates including Angel Academe, Baltic Ventures and Green Angel Syndicate; Venture Capital firms including Albion Capital and Amadeus Capital Partners and venture builders such as Zinc.
Following on from the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, a major focus for the Summit was discussing how Signatories can Accelerate Action & Economic Growth with Debbie Wosskow OBE (who Co-Chairs the Investing in Women Taskforce) hosting a discussion which included Alex Seddon who is Head of Impact & Private Equity at M&G plc, an LP into funds; Paul Miller, CEO and Co-founder of Bethnal Green Ventures; Zareen Ali Co-founder and CEO of Cogs AI and Brynne Kennedy, Managing Partner of Smart Society Ventures.
Women face barriers raising investment from seed stage all the way up to growth capital at series A, B and beyond with Paul sharing that at Bethnal Green Ventures they see how much harder it is for female founders to raise seed capital than male founders from their cohorts, whilst often receiving less favourable term sheets too.
While there are signs in the data that investment is gradually shifting towards a slightly more balanced allocation for female founders at seed stage (at Baltic Ventures 55% of our investments have been into female led startups), this development isn’t being seen in later stage deals.
The upshot is that for all the focus over the past decade on getting more capital into female founded businesses, improvement on the ground remains sadly limited. The capital going to female only founded businesses remains at around 2% of venture capital invested in the UK and things got slightly worse between 2023 to 2024 (mostly due to increased investment in AI, a sector with disproportionately higher numbers of male founders).
One area that was highlighted was that only 3 Limited Partners (LPs) have signed up to the code; Better Society Capital, M&G and the British Business Bank. More are going to be needed on board as signatories of the code to materially affect how capital is allocated to entrepreneurs.
All in all everyone agreed there’s still a long way to go!