Our mission to create a more level playing field for Yorkshire's female entrepreneurs: Katherine Megson

Amongst the challenges facing female entrepreneurs are the all-too pervasive misconceptions about their ability or suitability for entrepreneurship.

Such attitudes – rooted in casual sexism and misogyny – when held by prospective investors, recruitment prospects, mentors or even family and friends, can be a major blocker to achieving ambitions, securing investment or, in the worst-case scenarios, even to starting a business in the first place.

The research shows that outdated attitudes are having an impact in Yorkshire. Lloyds Bank found that in 2022, four in five women-owned businesses in the region were concerned about not having equal opportunities to their male counterparts.

This was despite more than half of them reporting an increase in revenues in the previous 12 months.

In Leeds specifically, The Data City revealed that only 5 per cent of funding rounds currently go to female-led businesses. This funding also tends to be smaller, with female-led companies accounting for only 1 per cent of the total investment value in the region.

It was this imbalance which motivated the launch of our pilot Female Founders Incubator in Leeds.

The six-month programme creates an environment to help more female-founded tech businesses thrive. We launched our first cohort of this programme in Leeds at Platform - the city’s ‘home for tech’, which is a hub for over 100 of Yorkshire’s most innovative digital tech startups.

From working with female founders, we know that the main challenges they face were not being able to get access to the right advice, difficulties in building their network with strategic connections, and simply a lack of funding.

To help to tackle this, Bruntwood SciTech’s Female Founders Incubator provides £20,000 worth of free specialist business support for six to nine early stage female-led startups per cohort. The programme offers 1-2-1 business growth advice, exclusive access to tech sector events, free workspace in Bruntwood SciTech’s dedicated tech incubator in Platform, access to resources, networking opportunities, and access to its UK-wide partner network and ecosystem of 1,100 like-minded businesses.

Central to the support offered, though, is the monthly business matched-mentoring with industry leaders, experts and entrepreneurs who have already carved out a path to success in the tech sector.

One of our major success stories has been working with the startup business Live More Offline.

Alessandra La Via, its founder and a member of our first cohort, had a vision to create a business that could help teams improve their ways of working in digital workplaces, where issues such as blurred boundaries, video call exhaustion, distractions and loneliness in hybrid teams can affect productivity and wellbeing.

The human impact of digital work has become a big challenge in the future of work and Alessandra wanted to offer a full-product solution that helped teams improve their performance, wellbeing and sense of belonging.

The Female Founders Incubator and the support it offered gave Alessandra the confidence to grow her business and led to securing investment as a direct result of the programme.

We introduced Alessandra to Zandra Moore, CEO of Panintelligence, as her mentor for the programme.

Zandra provided advice and support during the programme, and was so impressed by the market application and potential of Live More Offline that she made her first business angel investment - in conjunction with Ada Ventures - to help support scaling the business.

Zandra has since gone on to make a further three investments into female-founded businesses.

For Live More Offline, Zandra’s investment helped the business to provide workplaces with data insights into how their people are experiencing digital work and offer training to change habits to create better digital workplaces.

This is just one of several direct examples of how impactful programmes like our Incubator can be in supporting and nurturing more female-led businesses.

During that first programme at Platform our FFI supported founders to secure investment worth £66,500; recruit more staff; gain a total of 90 new business introductions from our network; receive speaker opportunities at tech events such as FinTech North’s Leeds Conference; and raise their profile by securing awards and featuring in media publications.

The success of this programme has more than doubled the number of female-founded businesses at Platform.

It has also enabled us to expand the programme to Manchester, with future plans to also expand it to our Alderley Park campus in Cheshire and West Village in Leeds - Platform’s cutting-edge sister workspace.

It’s important to recognise that our programme is far from the only incubator available to women looking to start, grow or scale their business. According to Invest in Women, there are over 180 incubators or accelerators across the UK, a rapidly increasing portion of which are either aimed directly at supporting female founders, or which are growing their proposition for women.

However, this progress should not mean that we rest on our laurels. There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure the UK is harnessing the knowledge and skills of ambitious, entrepreneurial women.

This is why we need more incubator programmes to help empower the next generation of female founders, leaders, and entrepreneurs. From large corporates to successful founders and educators, everyone has the ability to play a part in finally making the UK business landscape a more level playing field.

Katherine Megson is Innovation Programme Manager for Bruntwood SciTech in Leeds