Taking the UK investment community to task

For years, the conversation around investment in women-led businesses has tended to circle the same old themes. Or maybe “excuses” would be a better word: pipeline, confidence, and founder readiness.

But listening to the co-chairs of the Invest in Women Taskforce, Debbie Wosskow and Hannah Bernard, there is a sense that the argument has shifted decisively away from whether women entrepreneurs are investment-ready and toward whether the investment ecosystem itself is fit for purpose.

The numbers they are talking about are difficult to ignore.

“When the Taskforce was launched, we set out with an ambitious goal: to fundamentally change how capital flows to women-led businesses,” says Hannah Bernard. “Through sustained collaboration between government, financial institutions and the investment community, the Taskforce has convened £635m in capital commitments, more than double its original £250m ambition. Capital deployment began in 2025, with over £70m already invested across female-led funds and founders, demonstrating tangible progress from commitment to delivery.”

Bernard and Wosskow are not running a niche diversity initiative or a CSR side project. The Invest in Women Taskforce is commercial, systems-focused and rooted in long-term economic impact.

“Since its inception in 2024, the Taskforce has successfully shifted the national conversation on women’s access to finance and delivered against its founding ambition to catalyse structural change in how capital is allocated to women entrepreneurs and investors across the UK,” Bernard says. “What was frequently framed as a demand-side issue, a perceived lack of women founders or fund managers, is now widely recognised as a supply-side challenge: a systemic bias in how capital is allocated and who makes those decisions.”

Women backing women investment model gains scale

Central to that shift is the creation of the Women Backing Women Fund of Funds, managed by Bootstrap4F.

“The Fund is widely recognised as the largest female-led fund of funds globally and the first of its kind in the UK, with a mandate focused explicitly on backing female-led and gender-balanced investment teams,” Bernard says.

For Wosskow, scale is the main difference between a conversation and an actual market correction.

“Within the £635m funding pool, £130m relates to the first close of Bootstrap4F’s landmark Women Backing Women fund of funds,” she says. “It is a truly significant moment for UK investment.”

She is equally forthright about why the intervention was necessary in the first place.

“The levels of capital reaching women founders have been unacceptably low for too long,” Wosskow says. “Decisive action was required, which is why we prioritised a fund of funds led by general partners, and we need to support more women founders to develop strong commercial track records in this space.”

The underlying issue, both women argue, is not a shortage of viable businesses. It is the composition and culture of the investment world itself.

“When you walk into a room asking for investment, nearly everyone in the room is male,” Wosskow says. “I have experienced this countless times during my career.”

It is an imbalance that continues to shape where money flows, and the statistics back it up.

“Only 16% of senior investment professionals in the UK are women, and we know that women are twice as likely to back women-led businesses,” Wosskow says. “The persistent underrepresentation of women in these rooms goes a long way towards explaining why so many women-led businesses continue to be overlooked.”

UK investment system faces pressure to change

Bernard argues that the problem runs even deeper than representation.

“What has been fundamentally broken is deal origination,” she says. “For decades, capital has flowed through networks built by men, for men. The result is a structural blind spot: a system that has consistently missed opportunities because it kept looking in the same places.”

That extends into the mechanics of how businesses are assessed.

“Women-led businesses have historically been evaluated through frameworks designed around men, the messaging investors recognise, the pitching cycles they reward, the sectors they default to,” Bernard says.

But both women repeatedly return to the same point: this is not about charity or preferential treatment.

“To be clear, our aim is not to favour women, it is to stop overlooking returns,” Wosskow says. “The fund of funds is a commercial vehicle. Capital has been missing opportunities because it keeps looking in the same places, at the same people.”

The commercial argument becomes harder to dismiss when paired with the data both women cite.

“We know women-led businesses generate 35% better returns, so the commercial case is clear,” Wosskow says.

Bernard adds that institutional backing now signals a broader market shift.

“Bringing together private and public institutional capital from four of the leading financial institutions in the UK, Barclays, the British Business Bank, M&G plc and Nationwide, demonstrates this is a commercially serious proposition,” she says.

Both acknowledge that early-stage funding is only part of the problem.

“The jump from Seed to Series A and beyond is where many women founders stall, and it is where the funding gap is most acute,” Bernard says.

And if the UK fails to address that gap, Wosskow believes the consequences will extend far beyond the start-up ecosystem.

“From a macroeconomic perspective, the cost of inaction is significant: £250bn,” she says. “That is how much value could be added to the UK economy if women entrepreneurs were backed at the same rate as their male counterparts.”

The bigger risk, she suggests, is that ambitious founders simply stop waiting for the UK market to catch up.

“Ultimately, these businesses either stall before reaching their full potential due to a lack of capital and support, or they look elsewhere, to other international markets that are willing to recognise and reward their value,” Wosskow says. “The UK cannot afford to let that happen.” 

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