What do you think about when you picture a British female entrepreneur? Is it Trinny Woodall launching Trinny London after a long TV career or Deborah Meaden from Dragons’ Den? Maybe it’s Anita Roddick who launched The Body Shop in the Seventies. Chances are, beyond these examples, you may struggle to name a female entrepreneur, and you most certainly won’t know that they could be worth over £50bn to the British economy right now.
For Starmer and Reeves, growth, how to get it, how to stimulate it and how to reap the rewards of it has been a single focus. Get that right and the rest follows. More employment means more tax receipts and more tax receipts mean more money to deliver better services. Or so goes the argument. Various economic interventions have spluttered with a series of false starts, U-turns and dead ends, with UK growth remaining sluggish.
The UK has underperformed its peers over the last decade, hit by a series of shocks, including the pandemic, the 2022 energy crisis, Brexit, and now the Iran war, leaving growth well below historical averages.
In his much-discussed essay, Tony Blair has doubled down on the idea that economic growth needs to be the government’s overriding priority. Blair said Labour had created “headwinds, not tailwinds” for business through policies such as raising employers’ national insurance, strengthening workers’ rights legislation, pushing up minimum wages, and a focus on aspects of the net zero agenda.
At no point did he gesture to the huge potential being lost every day. If people are serious about growth, backing scaling companies needs to be at the centre of the debate. And there are some companies that are being shamefully overlooked right now – the women-powered ones. Help them grow and the Treasury could see the money flowing into the economy.
New data from Women Are Good Business, powered by The Gender Index, suggests that the numbers could be extraordinary. The headline finding is this: if women-powered companies were scaled at the same rate as their male-led counterparts, it could unlock £54.5bn in revenue and generate £20.7bn for the treasury every single year. This is not a marginal gain. It could be a structural transformation of the public finances.
The data also shows precisely where women-powered companies stop growing at the same rate as men-led ones. At the micro level, women hold their own: 22 per cent of companies with 0-4 employees are women-powered, by 101-200 employees, it has fallen to 13.3 per cent and by 301-400 employees, just 11 per cent are women-led.
Research shows the businesses women lead are built for longevity, reinvesting profit rather than extracting it in a quick exit; they grow at a pace that prioritises resilience over the quick buck that venture capital romanticises
Closing the scaling gap across just the 51-200 employee range, otherwise known as the critical mid-growth zone, could create nearly 390,000 jobs. That is employment in precisely the kind of productive, growing businesses that regional economies could be built on.
The data has existed for years, scattered across reports and spreadsheets, waiting for those in charge to recognise it and take action. The case is made with ease: women-powered businesses generate twice the return on investment compared to male-led counterparts but less than 2 per cent of venture capital ever reaches women. The gap is not a problem. It is an economic opportunity; backing women should be part of the strategy.
Parliament has already done the work on what needs to change. In 2025, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee published its examination of female entrepreneurship. It called for a Female Enterprise Investment Scheme, sitting alongside existing tax reliefs, but with higher incentives specifically designed to drive funding into female-led businesses, a new Office for Women’s Business Ownership and a 10 per cent public procurement target for women-powered businesses.
Research shows the businesses women lead are built for longevity, reinvesting profit rather than extracting it in a quick exit; they grow at a pace that prioritises resilience over the quick buck that venture capital romanticises.
In a country that has spent decades lurching between short-termism and stagnation, this is precisely the model of enterprise that deserves to be shouted about from the rooftops. These kinds of businesses provide real stability needed to underpin the economy. And yet we have a system designed around the quick sale, the clean exit, the capital event, the founder cashing out, a system that is structurally blind to this kind of sustained value. It certainly does not reward it.
It is the businesses, built slowly and built to last, that will still be employing people and paying tax in 20 years’ time. The kinds of businesses that women build. The woman who built a business over 15 years, launches; the founder who built up from her kitchen and now employs 50 people, the entrepreneur whose exit may be modest by City or venture capital standards, but transformative by every other measure.
Blair is right that the government needs to help businesses, not hinder their ability to grow. But we also need to look at the ones who are being undersold as an opportunity for growth too. Back those entrepreneurs and we could unlock £20.7bn a year and hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is the scale of the prize and it would deliver sustained, outsized returns.
