🙎♀️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
One of the longest-running research projects here at The Entrepreneurs Network is our Female Founders Forum. Through the Forum, we seek to encourage entrepreneurship among women in Britain, as well as highlighting the obstacles that hold them back – such as the gaping gender equity gap.
Data like this is critical ammunition for making the case that further change is required to give women entrepreneurs an equal shot at success compared to their male counterparts. Therefore, while their findings are far from positive, a new research paper from Camille Hebert, Emmanuel Yimfor and Heather Tookes, is a welcome contribution to the evidence base around the role of gender and startup financing.
In their dataset of venture capital-backed American companies, they not only find that women comprise just 13.3% of founders, but also that this figure actually shrinks to a mere 4% when looking at founders who have started three or more companies. This is perhaps counter to what one might expect, given that serial entrepreneurship is at least correlated with startup success.
Unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t end there. The authors’ analysis also reveals that:
“[W]omen serial founders are penalized with smaller VC deals following failures of their prior startups but they are not rewarded with larger deal sizes following past successes. By contrast, men are rewarded for their prior experiences as founders, regardless of whether their startups were failures or successes.”
And it gets worse still. They further identify a negative spillover effect that occurs when a female-founded startup fails in an investor’s portfolio – whereby the value of subsequent deals involving women-led companies falls by between 6.7-7.5 percentage points over the next five years.
What policymakers should make of all this is not straightforward. It points to the root cause being a more societal issue – whereby female founders are punished via a mixture of bias and stereotyping. Perhaps more than anything, changing that will require VCs themselves to ensure they are not – even unconsciously – discriminating against female founders.
An economy can hardly hope to fire on all cylinders if it doesn’t unleash the full potential of one half of its population. While stories of fantastic women-led businesses are becoming more common, data like these underscore just how much further we have to go.
🌱 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
Behind every spinout is a system that knows how to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset in scientists. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wouldn’t be the last place to look up to in that respect – its Technology Licensing Office handled 593 new invention disclosures in 2023 and supported 23 startups to spin out that year, adding to a total of nearly 600 spinouts since 2000.
Last week, Professor Dame Fiona Murray, Associate Dean of Innovation at MIT School of Management, told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee what MIT gets right about preparing innovators. Entrepreneurship training is woven into the fabric of postgraduate programmes, sending a clear signal that launching a startup is a valued career path and rewarding academics for commercialisation in the tenure process. MIT also creates cross-disciplinary opportunities, such as bringing together STEM PhD candidates with business school students to focus on turning ideas into businesses.
This is part of undergraduate training too:
“…what our undergraduates, particularly our technical undergrads, find most interesting are the courses where we put interesting problems in front of them. They are doing engineering work or scientific work focused on a real problem, and we then wrap innovation education around it. What would it take to turn that into a real product? The education is a lot less about writing a business plan. We try to weave it into existing classes and a number of extracurricular things.”
Equally important is providing infrastructure support. Many deep tech founders spend their early funding – the first $5 million, according to Murray – replicating university equipment just to repeat the experiments. MIT has responded by opening its core facilities to alumni startups on easy terms and without IP reach-through. As she noted, “the government have paid for the equipment, so it is part of economic growth” – framing shared infrastructure as a smart use of public investment rather than university generosity.
When asked about the early signals of research with the potential for successful commercialisation, Murray pointed to two main characteristics: timing and people. The strongest ventures emerge when the scientific risk has been reduced but engineering challenges remain – essentially, the moment when science is proven but building a prototype requires additional work and funding. Equally important is having the right team: a motivated PhD or postdoc who is ready to lead the company, supported by a professor who believes in the idea but doesn’t try to run it. “Most professors are terrible CEOs,” she noted. Moderna exemplifies this model, where timing and team dynamics aligned with well-developed research. What matters is a small, aligned team with ambition, trust, and a well-timed leap.
💼 Florian Golser, Intern
Now encompassing over 1.7 million individuals in the UK alone, the gig economy has become one of the defining features of the modern world of work. On paper, this benefits both individuals and firms by better matching the supply and demand of labour, granting workers more opportunities to earn, and giving businesses that contract them greater flexibility. Academic evidence has even shown how gig work platforms can increase entrepreneurship, ultimately keeping markets dynamic in the long run.
Despite this, the rise of the gig economy is not without its critics. To be sure, even its biggest proponents would readily admit that the gig economy has drawbacks that may warrant further inspection. Due to the remote nature of many gig economy jobs, freelancers may face strong international competition, and thus be forced to accept lower wages. Most receive no benefits and nearly 500,000 earn too little to qualify for Statutory Sick Pay. Only gig workers with ‘employee’ status qualify for minimum wage, while those who are deemed self-employed – which remains the norm – are left with few legal protections to fall back on. While gig work can empower individuals to launch something of their own, further reforms could help to ensure the gig economy truly can serve as a springboard for genuine entrepreneurship.
One promising change would be the introduction of portable benefits – employment protections like sick pay or pension contributions that follow workers across jobs and platforms. This would preserve the flexibility that makes gig work attractive, while extending key advantages of traditional employment. Last Monday, Republican Senators in the US proposed a bill that would allow companies to offer benefits to gig workers without reclassifying them as employees. Although the scheme would be voluntary, it marks a step in the right direction – and is something that the UK should seriously consider replicating.
Alongside this, introducing targeted tax credits for freelancers – similar to schemes in most OECD countries – could help reduce financial barriers to self-improvement and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Currently, the self-employed cannot claim relief on training that develops new skills. According to a 2023 report by IPSE, 51% of freelancers undertake no training, and those who do spend an average of £828 – a figure that does not include the opportunity cost of time spent away from work. By removing this barrier, the government could help unlock entrepreneurship among its growing population of gig workers, and begin addressing the UK’s productivity gap.