The Female Founders Forum is a joint project led by The Entrepreneurs Network and supported by Barclays. Over the past several years, we have highlighted a range of different challenges women-led startups face, showcased some of the country’s most trailblazing female founders, and put forward a variety of proposals to both the government and the private sector to ensure nobody is unfairly held back in their ambition to build a flourishing business.
This year, we take a look at the experiences of female academic entrepreneurs in Britain’s spinout ecosystem — to understand the challenges they continue to face, what progress is being made, and where further effort should be concentrated to enable and encourage more women to commercialise their academic research.
Executive summary
University spinouts — startups based on commercialised academic research — are a vital source of Britain’s innovative capacity and economic prosperity. Compared to many other nations around the world, our spinout ecosystem — comprising first and foremost academic founders themselves, but also university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), accelerators and incubators, mentors, and investors — does a good job of turning academic research into commercially viable goods and services.
Yet it is not without fault. In 2023, the Government published the Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies, which shined a light on the different ways would-be founders face systemic barriers that stymie their ability to spin out research into thriving startups — or deter them from ever doing so in the first place.
While there are challenges for all founders, women often face distinct, disproportionate and compounding barriers — rooted in academic culture, risk aversion, and a lack of tailored support. In 2023, less than 8% of spinouts had all-women founding teams, with over 75% being all-male, demonstrating how the system was failing to tap into the potential of the UK’s full talent pool. More than two years on from the Independent Review, we ask whether progress is showing up in founders’ experiences, and whether it is reaching women, who remain under-represented in the pipeline and in spinout leadership.
While there has been modest improvement in recent years, partially as the result of the Independent Review, progress remains incremental and significantly below equal gender representation. Extrapolating based on the years that data is available for, it would take until 2060 to achieve gender parity in terms of the percentage of female-led companies incorporated. Importantly, current research fails to adequately examine how gender intersects with spinout sectors and university support mechanisms, potentially missing key barriers unique to female spinout founders. This report aims to address that.
foreword: seema malhotra mp
Britain has long been home to some of the best universities in the world. The research conducted at these institutions pushes forward the frontiers of human knowledge and improves our understanding of the world around us.
Universities are also engines for the national economy. Our ability to transform ideas dreamt up on campuses into marketready businesses represents one of our country’s greatest economic strengths.
But, as this report from The Entrepreneurs Network and Barclays makes clear, that opportunity is not yet fully accessible to everyone.
If we are to deliver on our Mission for Growth, we cannot afford to leave any talent sitting on the sidelines. The data in this report is a reminder of the work ahead; all-women founding teams still make up less than 8% of spinouts, and it is imperative that we dismantle the barriers and biases that prevent more women from commercialising their research.
Doing that won’t be easy, but it is necessary. As this report states, we must de-risk the leap from academia to entrepreneurship, improve data collection so we can better diagnose where in the pipeline women are being let down, and rethink how to structure support for different types of spinouts. A culture shift within universities could inspire new cohorts to consider spinning out research, and this should begin by embedding entrepreneurship at all stages of students’ academic journeys.
At the same time, we need to make sure young women have all the information to make the best possible decisions about their careers. We know that STEM subjects are a proven pathway to entrepreneurship and to economic resilience, yet one which too few young women take. Addressing the underlying reasons for this will be vital for ensuring that more women shape our future technologies.
I want to thank The Entrepreneurs Network and Barclays for all the work they have done over the last decade in highlighting both the barriers women entrepreneurs face, as well as the incredible contributions they make. Only by creating a level playing field for all can we restore growth across the breadth of our economy.
Seema Malhotra MP is the Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Minister for Equalities), Department for Education
FOREWORD: Juliet gouldman
So many of the UK’s best ideas start in its universities. Spinouts transform academic research into real-world impact — they fuel innovation, create jobs and drive economic growth. Yet as this report shows, the journey from academia to market isn’t smooth. Despite progress in equity terms and transparency, too many founders — especially women and teams outside the ‘Golden Triangle’ (Cambridge, Oxford, London) — face higher barriers and fewer routes to scale.
Barclays recognise the pivotal role of the UK’s world-class universities in shaping the nation’s future. Through our experts in Barclays Eagle Labs and Innovation Banking, and our partnerships with universities, Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) and enterprise teams, we support spinouts from inception through to high-growth businesses.
We are committed to helping dismantle the wider, systemic barriers that female founders face. This research underscores the critical role of peer networks, accelerators and supportive communities, as well as accommodating caregiving responsibilities. Yet systemic challenges persist, with examples in this report demonstrating bias in investment processes. Barclays have an active role in the Invest in Women Taskforce — we’ve committed £50 million of investment funding to the Taskforce and aligned resource and support to a breadth of initiatives that benefit female-powered businesses across the ecosystem — we’re determined to drive meaningful and sustainable change.
Our longstanding work with the Female Founders Forum demonstrates the power of partnership and our ability to convene, listen and act. This report shows that progress has been made, but more must be done to make the pathway from university to market simpler, faster, and more accessible. The answer is not to “fix the founder,” it’s to fix the system, with better data, more inclusive pathways, and capital that reaches every region and background.
If we get this right, the UK wins: more world-class research translates into businesses, more high-quality jobs across the regions, and a stronger pipeline of diverse founders building solutions the world needs. Let’s turn the recommendations in these pages into action together.
Juliet Gouldman is a Director at Barclays and member of the Invest in Women Taskforce
Foreword: Jennifer sieg
British prosperity rests, in part, on an important premise: that our best ideas can successfully travel from our universities to the marketplace. For a long time, I wrote about this principle as a journalist, covering the ins and outs of entrepreneurship in the UK. I spoke to founders, investors and policymakers, and reported on the systems designed to help companies grow.
Much of that reporting focused on what could be seen and measured, whether that be policy reforms, funding announcements or the signals of progress that make for good headlines.
Now that I’m a founder myself, however, I see those systems very differently — from the perspective of lived experience rather than surface-level success — and that shift in perspective is exactly why reports like this matter. So we can look beyond the surface to close the gap between what is designed to work, and what actually does.
In 2023, the Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies set out a blueprint to improve how ideas move from universities into the market, promising a faster, fairer and more founder-friendly ecosystem.
Today, progress has been made, but for too many, the horizon still feels distant. The lived experience described in this report shows that the barriers many female academic entrepreneurs face are not a lack of confidence or ambition, but the practical realities of how the system operates.
Time is constrained — particularly for those carrying the majority of caring or household responsibilities — and stepping away from a traditional academic or professional path continues to carry disproportionate risk.
At the same time, investment flows more readily into STEM disciplines than into the social sciences, humanities and arts, where many women are developing ideas with clear commercial and societal value. Together, these pressures quietly narrow what feels possible, shaping not just who participates in entrepreneurship, but which ideas are pursued at all.
The result is that too much talent is left behind. This is not only a loss for individual founders — it is a loss for the innovation economy we are trying to build.
If we want to see real change, universities, investors and policymakers must stop trying to ‘fix’ female founders, and start fixing the systems around them.
Jennifer Sieg is a Co-Founder of The Fact Studio and an Adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network
key findings
1. The opportunity cost of spinning out is higher for women
The risk associated with spinning out a company is disproportionately higher for women due to the intersection of academic pressures and their typically inequitable share of caregiving responsibilities. These factors combine to make women more risk-averse about taking time away to start a company.
For women to take the risk and spin out, they need a way to pause their academic duties without penalty. Introducing a structural mechanism such as a ‘Commercialisation Fellowship’ would give them the time and security they need to transition into entrepreneurship. The Fellowships would need to account for a broad selection of university processes — for example, a multi-year break to start and build a company risks ruining a publication record and harming Research Excellence Framework (REF) case studies.
2. Insufficient attention is paid to tackling structural bias in the ecosystem
Current interventions for female founders predominantly focus on training, mentorship, and role modelling. This approach assumes the problem lies solely with the individual rather than the ecosystem. That must change if female entrepreneurs are to be properly supported.
Mentorship is highly valuable for many individuals, but it doesn’t address the structural bias in the investment ecosystem, and the lack of female representation on investment committees (ICs). Taking negotiation as an example, female founders are often less likely to negotiate than their male counterparts, making them more likely to accept unfavourable terms. Female founders are also observed to negotiate less aggressively, which is often a rational response to a system where they face higher social penalties for assertiveness. If there were more women in decision-making positions in ICs (and other places, such as TTOs), then the perception of assertive negotiation would change. Mentoring and training are necessary but insufficient pieces of the puzzle; we also need to see greater representation amongst decision makers and need to take conscious steps to change a system that often doesn’t work for women.
3. Geographical and racial barriers compound challenges
Barriers to entry for women entrepreneurs are not uniform; they are compounded by other factors, such as location and race.
Beyond the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, both women and men encounter limited access to the concentrated capital and commercial expertise required to help get a spinout off the ground. Additionally, there are notable gaps at the intersection of race and gender — black women, for example, comprise only a small proportion of the professoriate, and the potential pool of black female spinout founders remains largely overlooked. This highlights shortcomings in the academic pipeline’s ability to identify and support such talent.
4. Financial bias permeates at pre-seed and seed stages
Female founders still encounter significant friction in accessing finance compared to male counterparts.
Investors and university investment committees continue to display bias in risk assessment, often requiring higher proof points from female founders. Meanwhile, the ‘Valley of Death’ bias is most notable at the earliest stages (pre-incorporation and seed), where funding is often based on the ‘potential’ of founders rather than the metrics of the business, a subjective measure that has historically favoured men.
Box 1. About the Valley of Death
The Valley of Death refers to the period in the development of a product or service when a significant increase in investment is required, making the risk of failure much more likely to outweigh any potential future return. It can occur in a wholly commercial organisation as well as in the context of commercialising university research and nascent technologies. It often specifically refers to the difficult period between Seed and Series A, during which a startup must prove its business model while facing resource constraints and uncertainty.
recommendations
1. Improve the collection of gender data to diagnose the ‘leaky pipeline’
Current data on spinouts is patchy, self-reported, and often aggregates high-growth intellectual property (IP) ventures with smaller, student startups, effectively masking the true gender gap. To fix this, universities receiving public funding (such as Higher Education Innovation Funding) should be required to publish data disaggregated by both gender and ethnicity. This data must go beyond simple metrics of ‘companies created’ to include granular details such as equity splits, licence terms, and pre-incorporation funding. Importantly, such data must distinguish between academic principal investigators and operational founders, and track survival rates over time. The Higher Education Statistics Agency’s (HESA) database on intellectual property income is a step towards this. It is only by measuring the ‘leaky pipeline’ with precision that we can identify exactly where female-led teams are falling behind, and develop strategies to help them effectively.
While the creation of the HESA Spinout Register is a welcome step-change in transparency, its current utility is limited by a lack of demographic indicators. To truly address the leaky pipeline, the Register should be evolved to include anonymised founder gender and ethnicity markers. By linking the Register’s company-level data with demographic identifiers, it helps move from general observations about the ecosystem to targeted interventions that support under-represented founders.
The need for this level of granularity in information is underscored by the stark disparities in the current ecosystem. Understanding underlying demographic data could help address barriers at the institutional level. The Independent Review of University Spin-Oout Companiess explicitly identified this data deficit as a primary obstacle to growth, leading the Government to formally commit to enhancing HESA’s reporting requirements.
The Investing in Women Code (IWC) has shown that improved data reporting can help drive institutional change. Since its inception, signatory banks, VCs and angels have used this gender-disaggregated data to better understand the landscape and take action to close gender gaps. Aligning the HESA Register’s data collection, specifically founder demographics, with the IWC’s framework, can bridge the gap between ‘university support’ and ‘private investment’.
2. Expand STEM pathways such as Innovate UK’s ICURe
STEM pathways such as Innovate UK’s ICURe (Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research) programme should be expanded. ICURe has demonstrated that when scientists are given the salary-supported time and allocated funding to validate their market, the spinout success rate can triple. That increase in success rate happens because the programme de-risks the venture early; by requiring over 100 customer discovery interviews, it replaces gut-feel entrepreneurship, which often favors those with existing high-level networks, with a rigorous, evidence-based approach.
Female-led spinouts often struggle at the pre-incorporation stage. Programmes such as ICURe help to fill this void. However, it remains an oversubscribed and selective resource. Expanding ICURe would ensure that STEM women in academia have a clear, funded pathway to leadership, preventing high-potential IP from stalling at the proof of concept stage due to a lack of institutional support.
3. Prioritise transparency about the long-term economic returns and career trajectories of different degree pathways to tackle the STEM drop-out rate
To address the disproportionate exit of capable women from STEM pipelines, the Government should work with the Industrial Strategy Council and Skills England to improve transparency regarding the long-term economic benefits of STEM pathways. By leveraging Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data, educational institutions can dismantle the norm that steers high-achieving girls toward humanities, instead illustrating that STEM serves as a vital gateway to high-growth sectors such as green tech and the life sciences. Ultimately, the Government must frame STEM-based entrepreneurship as an essential tool for economic resilience, ensuring women lead as the architects of future technologies rather than just their consumers.
4. Create bespoke pathways that support and encourage the unique forms of value creation inherent to SHAPE research
Current commercialisation pathways are designed primarily for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), neglecting the Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (SHAPE), disciplines where women are statistically more represented.
There are clear reasons for this initial focus. STEM research often yields tangible, patentable IP — such as novel drugs, materials, or devices, which have a clear market and can be easily protected, thereby attracting venture capital. This established infrastructure provides a relatively clear, albeit complex, roadmap for translating lab results into a marketable product.
In contrast, SHAPE disciplines often produce non-patentable IP, such as new methodologies, policy frameworks, digital toolkits, cultural content, social impact metrics, or behavioural insights. At the same time, SHAPE disciplines often have a lower capital requirement so they can go to market quicker, and their business models are often services or consultancy. Yet, for these fields, there is no established roadmap equivalent to the STEM spinout model for monetising social impact or cultural value. This lack of appropriate frameworks and dedicated support leaves potential SHAPE founders without a viable, recognised pathway to scale their impact commercially. Additionally, in SHAPE departments there is often a discomfort with specific commercialisation models which can be seen as antithetical to the academic mission of contributing to knowledge.
As a result, while the STEM spinout model remains a critical component of university commercialisation, there is an urgent need to create bespoke pathways, such as the ARC Accelerator, that support and encourage the unique forms of value creation inherent to SHAPE research.
5. De-risk career pauses with Commercialisation Fellowships
The career risk of leaving academia to build a company is a major deterrent for women, who often lack a mechanism to pause their academic duties without penalty. Men frequently benefit from a double standard in domestic responsibilities, allowing them to absorb the work of building a business while maintaining their academic output. Universities should consider introducing ‘Commercialisation Fellowships’ that buy out teaching and administrative time for about 12 months, allowing academics to focus on business building without risking damaging their publication records or REF contributions.
6. Address the time poverty trap that disproportionately stymies female academic entrepreneurs
For all founders, time is perhaps the scarcest resource they have. Our research has found that female founders often face disproportionate pressure on their available time due to domestic and caregiving responsibilities. By moving away from the exclusionary evening drinks networking culture and offering hybrid or daytime sessions, accelerators can ensure caregivers are not structurally shut out of critical development and networking opportunities.
7. Embed commercialisation into teaching and learning
Universities should move from an ‘opt-in’ to an ‘opt-out’ model for commercialisation training into both STEM and SHAPE programmes from undergraduate to PhD. This structural change will capture high-potential researchers who consciously or unconsciously self-select out of entrepreneurship. Alongside this, specific ‘Entrepreneurial Research Experience Placements’ should be created for undergraduates to work inside active spinouts, demystifying the process at the earliest stage of their careers.
8. Move beyond the current model of mentorship
Mentorship programmes must move beyond just focusing on ‘fixing’ women’s confidence and broaden to include skills on access to capital and technical expertise. A National Founder Exchange could, for example, link female founders with experienced commercial CEOs who can teach operational scaling. This must be coupled with access to inclusive investors who are trained to recognise bias in their own questioning, shifting from prevention questions (focusing on risk) to promotion questions (focusing on growth). Crucially, support must shift from short six-week sprints to 12-24 month structures that help guide founders safely through the Valley of Death.
9. Create a distinct toolkit for SHAPE founders
Founders in SHAPE disciplines require a different support architecture than their STEM counterparts. Placing them in STEM accelerators is often not helpful, or can be actively harmful to their spinout journey if it wastes time and resources. Instead, programmes must be designed to teach SHAPE founders the technical and business rigor they may lack, such as financial modelling and productisation.
10. Incentivise commercialisation as a promotion metric
In many social science disciplines, commercialisation is viewed with suspicion, and traditional ‘impact’ — such as publications and citations — remains central to the REF. To change the culture, universities should formally recognise entrepreneurial outputs — such as IP creation and social enterprise formation — as a factor in promotion criteria. By validating commercial success as academic success, institutions can dismantle the stigma that currently prevents many female academics in these fields from pursuing spinout opportunities.
01) Introduction: What has changed for Britain’s academic entrepreneurs?
In 2023, the Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies was published — a landmark attempt to standardise the chaotic landscape of academic entrepreneurship in Britain. Led by Professor Irene Tracey and Dr Andrew Williamson, the review promised a fairer, faster system with founder-friendly equity splits and streamlined processes. The Government endorsed all recommendations, signalling a clear political will and intent to support entrepreneurs.
Three years on, the landscape has undoubtedly shifted. Data shows that the ‘Wild West’ of equity negotiation is being tamed; the average initial university stake fell to the lowest in a decade in 2024. As one investor told us during the research for this report, “egregious cases of universities demanding 50% equity have effectively disappeared.”
However, while policy has changed on paper, the lived experience for founders remains fraught with friction. As one founder noted, “they cut the red tape in half, but it’s still a lot of red tape!” The political intent has not yet fully translated into cultural change in the spinout ecosystem. Crucially, this friction is not felt equally. This report finds that while the spinout ecosystem is improving for the ‘standard’ founder (male, STEM-focused, Golden Triangle-based), it continues to fail those who fall outside this mould.
Fairer equity share policies
One of the main outcomes of the Independent Review has been a move towards more generous equity splits for founders. The Independent Review highlighted that excessive university equity stakes deter founders and investors, and encouraged adoption of standard term sheets similar to the American model, which often caps university ownership to around 20%. In response, many universities revised their spinout terms. The average initial university stake fell to 16.1% in 2024 — down from 21.5% in 2023, and the lowest in a decade. Over 50 universities have now signed up to best-practice guidelines on spinout equity and intellectual property (IP).
In order to address equity disputes that often stall female founders, the UK could look to Sweden’s Lärarundantaget (‘Professor’s Privilege’) model. In this model, the academic researcher retains 100% ownership of their IP, fundamentally shifting the power dynamic from the university to the founder. For women, who research suggests face higher social penalties during aggressive negotiations, this ‘default to owner’ status eliminates the need to ask the university for permission to innovate. While a full move away from institutional ownership may be complex for the UK, adopting a ‘Sweden-lite’ approach, such as 0% equity stakes for light-IP SHAPE ventures, would significantly lower the barrier to entry.
Increased transparency and consistency
The Independent Review also called for greater transparency in how universities handle spinouts to demystify the process for academics and level the negotiating field. In the past, founders often entered discussions not knowing what a ‘standard deal’ was, and terms varied widely between institutions. Now, many universities have published summary spinout policies online, covering typical equity splits, royalty rates and IP ownership.
Many of those we spoke to in the process of researching this report noted that there are signs of convergence around common norms, such as 20% university equity for IP-heavy projects, and less or none at all for software or light IP ventures. Founders and investors generally view this standardisation positively, noting that it has levelled the playing field and reduced extreme outlier deals. An early-stage investor we interviewed observed that egregious cases of universities demanding equity of 50% or more have effectively disappeared: “I’ve not seen that kind of stake in the last two years.” Instead, universities are mostly taking dilutable stakes in the 10-20% range, which investors find much more palatable. This alignment is directly attributable to the Independent Review’s influence and the collective pressure it created for universities to not be seen as outliers.
A significant development in this transparency drive is the launch of the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) Spinout Register in 2025. This tool — the first in the world of its kind — provides an official, granular list of individual spinout companies, moving the ecosystem away from the black box of aggregate university-level reporting. For the first time, policymakers and investors have a baseline from which to track growth, survival, and regional distribution with precision. However, while the Register is a step forward for operational transparency, it does not yet include the diversity data required to measure the gender and ethnicity gaps accurately.
Policy ‘noise’ versus reality
Despite these policy-level changes, many research participants emphasised that cultural and operational change is lagging. As one technology transfer consultant put it, “there’s been a tremendous amount of policy noise about commercialisation and spinning out, but aside from a few isolated pockets, not a huge amount has changed on the ground.” The majority of founders responded that they had not noticed the promised changes in process or transparency. Several academics who spun out before 2023 commented that while universities announced new policies, “it is still a long and arduous process to actually negotiate and launch a company.” In some cases, the only difference they saw was the numerical tweak in equity share: “the main difference is universities reduced the percentage they take,” one said, “but that hasn’t driven broader change.” In other words, founders still face many of the old hurdles, such as lengthy paperwork, slow decision cycles and unclear guidance — even if the end-point deal is slightly more founder-friendly. Some admitted they don’t know if anything has improved at all.
What does it mean for female founders?
A core aim of this project is to examine spinouts through a gender lens. While many challenges affecting spinout founders are universal, there are specific dynamics that disproportionately impact women, from the makeup of the talent pipeline to biases in investment. The gender disparity in spinouts is linked to the under-representation of women in many STEM fields, and especially at senior levels. Fewer women reaching the stage of professor in STEM disciplines means fewer opportunities to spawn spinouts. One research participant noted that “very few women initially pursue STEM fields… we need to go right back to school level to address these root causes.”
Recommendation: Improve the collection of gender data to diagnose the ‘leaky pipeline’
To address the leaky pipeline in university spinouts, patchy, self-reported data needs to be replaced with mandatory, disaggregated reporting on gender and ethnicity. Current metrics often mask the true gender gap by grouping high-growth IP ventures with smaller, student startups. Instead, universities should be required to disclose granular details such as equity splits, licence terms, and the distinction between academic principal investigators and operational founders. This work has begun, as seen in HESA’s Spinout Register and its database on intellectual property income. However, the Register should be evolved to include anonymised demographic markers. By linking company-level performance and survival rates with founder demographics, the ecosystem can move beyond general observations toward targeted, evidence-based interventions that support under-represented founders.
Box 2. How the Invest in Women Code is increasing transparency across the ecosystem
Initiatives such as the Investing in Women Code (IWC) have greatly increased transparency and accountability for supporting female entrepreneurs across the financial services industry. By providing gender disaggregated data and requiring commitments to the code from the industry, signatories consistently outperform the broader market when looking at gender lens investing. There are lessons to be learnt and embedded from the IWC into the HESA Spinout Register.
Case study: Suzanne Eldridge — Co-Founder, ReFleks
Dr Suzanne Eldridge is the Co-Founder of ReFleks, a Queen Mary University of London spinout that incorporated in May 2025. ReFleks is developing a first-in-class therapeutic to treat cartilage damage and osteoarthritis (OA), a condition affecting millions worldwide and around one in 10 working-age people in the UK. Despite its huge socioeconomic burden, OA currently has no disease-modifying treatments.
Suzanne founded ReFleks to translate promising academic science into something that genuinely changes patients’ lives. Early in the journey, she learned that success in healthcare innovation is not defined by the science alone. Delivering real impact requires understanding the wider healthcare ecosystem — how patients are treated, how clinicians work, and how products are adopted and scaled. For ReFleks, this meant focusing early on ensuring its lead therapeutic would be effective not only in planned clinical trials, but also practical, accessible and scalable within real-world healthcare systems, without reliance on specialist manufacture or fragile supply chains.
Several structures proved critical in accelerating progress. Participation in accelerator programmes such as Zinc and Pioneer (in partnership with UKRI and Innovate UK) provided invaluable early-stage support, challenge and structure at a formative moment. Suzanne also highlights the importance of the wider life sciences community, with organisations such as the BioIndustry Association and OBN offering networks, insight and credibility that helped ReFleks navigate the early biotech landscape.
An unexpected hurdle came from navigating the transition from being an academic project to an incorporated company. University processes were not always designed for ventures that moved quickly or followed non-standard pathways, and resolving administrative and logistical problems was time-consuming. Suzanne overcame this through persistence, clarity of ambition and by leaning on external support to maintain momentum. However, her experience highlights the importance of creating spinout pathways that recognise and actively address these issues if high-impact academic research is to reach patients at pace and scale. Beyond institutional support, Suzanne found immense value in peer networks, particularly informal support from other female founders.
02) Reducing the risk of spinning out for female academics
A core finding of this research is that the risk profile of spinning out a company is disproportionately higher for women. This is not due to a lack of ambition, but due to the intersection of academic pressures and domestic responsibilities — a double burden that the current ecosystem fails to account for.
The time poverty trap
For all founders, time is perhaps the scarcest resource they have. Our research participants highlighted that the all-in culture of entrepreneurship therefore acts as a significant barrier to entry for those with primary caregiving responsibilities.
Research shows that where men often have a supportive spouse who manages the domestic sphere, female founders often report managing the mental load of the household alongside their research and venture, leading to higher rates of burnout or slower venture progression.
In our 2022 Female Founders Forum report One in a Million, we found that of our sample of female founders without children, half said they split chores evenly, a quarter said their partner does more of the chores, and a quarter said they tend to do more chores. That is in stark contrast to female founders with children: almost half (48%) said they do more of the chores.
On top of this, caregivers need schedules that align with their responsibilities, rather than being expected to find additional time. One founder, for example, highlighted that domestic responsibilities, such as school runs and homework, limit the ability to attend evening networking events and accelerator weekends that are standard in the sector. Related to this is the fact that accelerators often default to evening sessions — such as for drinks — which structurally excludes caregivers. Without flexible, daytime, or hybrid options, lots of women effectively self-select out of these critical development and networking opportunities.
Academic incentives and career risk
Transforming an academic discovery into a commercial product is not a path traditionally incentivised in universities. For many academics, pursuing a spinout feels like a career gamble. That is true for men and women, but due to the ‘time poverty trap’ many women face, this can be particularly acutely felt.
Time spent on startup creation is time not spent publishing papers or winning grants, which are the metrics that inform academic promotions. Until recently, an academic founder in the UK often had to choose between their university job and the company. One university innovation director told us that, “any academic who wanted to explore turning their research into a venture had to do so in their own time, or resign.”
Junior researchers in particular fear that stepping away from the standard track, from a postdoc to lectureship, to work on a startup could derail their academic prospects. As one early-career researcher said, “I love the idea of a spinout, but I also love the idea of a permanent academic job, and I’m not sure I can have both.” This can dissuade talented people, and especially those without an entrepreneurial bent, from ever considering commercialisation.
Unlike writing a book in academia, there is no standard mechanism to pause academic duties to build a company. This risk is particularly acute for women, who hold only 30% of professorships. Without a structural mechanism to pause academic duties without penalty, the choice to spin out becomes a choice to derail one’s academic career.
Recommendation: De-risk a career pause with ‘Commercialisation Fellowships’
The career risk of leaving academia to build a company is a major deterrent for women, who often lack a mechanism to ‘pause’ their academic duties without penalty. Universities should consider introducing ‘Commercialisation Fellowships’ that buy out teaching and administrative time for about 12 months, allowing academics to focus on business building without risking damaging their publication records or REF contributions.
Recommendation: Address structural barriers that create the ‘time poverty trap’
Time is often the scarcest resource for female founders due to disproportionate domestic and caregiving responsibilities. By moving away from the exclusionary evening drinks networking culture and offering hybrid or daytime sessions, accelerators can ensure caregivers are not structurally shut out of critical development and networking opportunities.
Case study: Riam Kanso — CEO, Conception X
Riam Kanso is the CEO of Conception X, a cross-university deep tech venture programme designed to help PhD students turn their research into viable companies. Since its inception, Conception X has supported hundreds of researchers, creating a new category of founder: the ‘Venture Scientist’. Under Riam’s leadership, the programme has achieved a 37% female founder rate in deep tech, a field traditionally dominated by men, by addressing the structural barriers to entry.
A core pillar of the Conception X model is the de-risking of the academic-to-founder transition. Riam says that the all-in culture of entrepreneurship, which often demands that founders quit their jobs and ‘build in a garage’, is structurally exclusionary. This is particularly true for women, who may fall into the ‘time poverty trap’ due to domestic responsibilities or a lower appetite for career instability when choosing between a secure postdoc and an uncertain startup. By allowing PhD students to build their ventures while completing their funded research, Conception X creates a period that bridges the gap without forcing a binary choice between a salary and an entrepreneurial vision.
Language and identity also play a critical role in Riam’s strategy. Recognising that women are more likely to self-select out of opportunities if they feel they don’t meet 100% of the criteria, Riam reframed the programme as an educational journey rather than a competition. By using the term ‘Venture Scientist’, she allows academics to maintain their professional identity while gaining commercial literacy.
As AI begins to disrupt traditional academic publication models, Riam views the increase in spinouts not just as a choice, but as an essential survival mechanism for universities. By creating pathways that accommodate founders with diverse life responsibilities, Conception X is demonstrating that the UK can only reach its potential if it stops trying to ‘fix’ women and starts fixing the structures that keep them out of the lab and the boardroom.
Case study: Wenmiao Yu — Co-Founder, Quantum Dice
Wenmiao Yu is the Co-Founder and Director of Business Development of Quantum Dice (QD), a company addressing a fundamental challenge in cybersecurity: the reliance of encryption systems on classical random number generators (RNGs) that are vulnerable to silent failure and physical attacks. QD’s technology originates from academic research in quantum optics, where intrinsically stochastic quantum processes enable the generation of verifiably secure randomness. Under this approach, QD can audit the randomness it produces, allowing security architects to build cryptographic systems with substantially higher assurance.
Wenmiao and her Co-Founders met through Oxford University Innovation’s Student Entrepreneurship Programme, through a shared interest in the market potential of the self-certifying quantum random number generator (QRNG) technology. Early momentum came when Wenmiao and her Co-Founder George secured Enterprise Fellowships at the Quantum Technologies Enterprise Centre, obtaining critical non-dilutive funding. Wenmiao focuses on QD’s go-to-market, playing a central part in the team’s successful Innovate UK application with the UK’s National Physical Laboratory to develop QRNG assurance methods. This grant provided both technical validation and external credibility, directly supporting the company’s subsequent £2 million fundraise which Wenmiao co-led with QD’s CEO.
QD’s early traction has been driven by strong institutional backing, targeted grant funding, and close alignment with the UK’s national technology roadmap. Wenmiao had to navigate long enterprise sales cycles, and market creation in a conservative security market. Ever entrepreneurial, Wenmiao and her Co-Founder are leveraging their QRNG expertise to offer a probabilistic computer product that can deliver significant energy and cost savings to organisations solving combinatorial optimisation problems. This is especially exciting for sectors such as logistics, telecommunications, and finance.
03) Making the leaky STEM pipeline watertight
The lack of female academic founders is a symptom of a broader structural failure: the UK’s ‘leaky pipeline’ for women in STEM. If the Government is to deliver its Mission for Growth and secure the UK’s position at the frontier of the global technological revolution, it must address the significant drop-off rates that occur at every stage, from A Levels to the professoriate, which ultimately thins the pool of potential entrepreneurs.
The ‘comparative advantage’ trap
The disparity begins early. While girls make up about 38% of A Level Mathematics students, they account for only 26% of the tech workforce. This attrition is partially driven by a ‘comparative advantage’ trap. While boys and girls achieve similar grades in STEM, girls often outperform their male peers in humanities. As such, a pupil with an ‘A’ in Physics and an ‘A*’ in History would likely be steered toward the latter.
This choice, while rationalised in the classroom, has profound long-term economic consequences. Graduates in Mathematics, Economics, and Engineering earn substantially more than those in SHAPE disciplines, yet parents and teachers rarely frame subject choice as a long-term innovation trade-off. To fix the spinout pipeline, universities and schools must provide targeted careers guidance that highlights the entrepreneurial and financial rewards of sticking with STEM.
Decoupling risk from research
When the perceived conflict between their professional identity and entrepreneurship is resolved, female participation skyrockets. Innovate UK’s Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe) programme is a gold standard here; while women-led teams are rare in the general ecosystem, they represent 26% of ICURe Entrepreneurial Leads. This demonstrates that the problem isn’t a lack of interest, but a lack of protected, funded time. When the risk of ‘failing’ at a startup is de-coupled from the risk of losing one’s academic salary, women are more likely to engage.
Recommendation: Tackle the STEM drop-out rate and prioritise transparency about the long-term economic returns and career trajectories of different degree pathways
Despite equal capability, women consistently drop out of the STEM pipeline from education to senior leadership. To tackle this, the Government should work with the Industrial Strategy Council and Skills England to prioritise transparency regarding the long-term economic returns and career trajectories of different degree pathways.
Specifically, schools and universities should be encouraged to use data to challenge the ‘comparative advantage’ trap, where high-achieving girls are steered away from STEM toward humanities because of marginally better grades in the latter, without a full understanding of the long-term innovation trade-off. That includes using the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data to show girls that STEM degrees serve as the primary entry point for the high-growth sectors targeted by the Industrial Strategy, such as green tech and the life sciences.
Moreover, in an era of AI-driven displacement, the Government should frame STEM-based entrepreneurship as a tool for economic resilience, ensuring that women are not just consumers of new technology, but the architects of the companies building it.
Recommendation: STEM pathways such as Innovate UK’s ICURe programme should be expanded
ICURe has proven that when scientists are given the salary-supported time and allocated funding to validate their market, the spinout success rate can triple. For women in STEM, this model can be particularly transformative. This suggests that when the informal networks of traditional tech transfer are replaced by a structured, meritocratic, and funded pathway, female researchers are significantly more likely to engage.
At the same time, pathways such as ICURe remain a selective, oversubscribed resource. In order to fix the STEM pipeline, we must move from a model of ‘selective acceleration’ towards a national standard. This involves expanding the budget to make market-discovery a standard, paid option for all UKRI-funded PhDs and postdocs.
Case study: Nicola Banks — Founder, One World Together
Nicola Banks is the Founder of One World Together, a social impact venture spinning out from the University of Manchester. One World Together pioneers trust-based giving and provides long-term and flexible funding to international development communities and organisations. Nicola describes herself as a “serendipitous social entrepreneur,” who would never have discovered entrepreneurship without the specific support ecosystem at Manchester, noting that in the humanities, commercialisation is simply “not a track that you are aware of.”
Her journey highlights the grey area of intellectual property in social sciences. After going through the university’s Innovation Factory, she was told her venture had no IP and was essentially cut loose to spin out independently. While initially offended, she later realised this gave her freedom from giving up equity to the university.
However, this freedom came with isolation from standard support pathways. Because One World Together is structured as a Community Interest Company (CIC), she found it impossible to raise standard equity investment. Instead, Nicola had to piece together small pots of philanthropic funding and grants, a process she described as resource-intensive.
Nicola illustrates the intense juggling act required of academic founders. To secure the funding needed to start One World Together, she had to agree to take on research work so her consultancy fees from it could be ring-fenced to fund her startup.
She emphasises that for academics, particularly early-career ones, entrepreneurship is a high-risk activity that doesn’t fit into the incentive system of papers and grants. While her work eventually contributed to her promotion to Chair, she notes that doing this earlier in her career could have been damaging to her probation and publication record.
04) Recognising the domain diversity of today’s spinouts
Most people assume spinouts are exclusively a STEM phenomenon — and to a large extent that is correct. STEM departments produce the lion’s share of spinouts, typically based on patentable inventions or novel software. But the broader definition of spinouts can include ventures stemming from SHAPE disciplines. Understanding the domain diversity of today's landscape, and the issues that impact different kinds of founders and their ventures, will be imperative to cultivating the next wave of successful spinouts.
Life sciences and tech reign
According to a Royal Academy of Engineering report, life sciences domains dominate British spinouts. Pharmaceutical-related spinouts lead all categories with 399 spinouts. AI-based spinouts are also rapidly growing, with 214 — up significantly year-on-year. These areas naturally align with spinout formation because they often yield protectable IP and attract venture funding. New medicines, materials or breakthrough AI algorithms have clear commercial pathways if successful. By contrast, social science innovations — such as an educational programme, a policy tool or an economics modelling service — don’t fit the typical high-growth startup mould that VCs seek, such as a large addressable market and scalable product. One investor stated, “if we’re looking for the next unicorn, you aren’t seeing those solutions come through the social sciences… STEM and life sciences more naturally lend themselves to this approach.” This perspective, while overlooking some opportunities, reflects the investor reality.
Unique needs of non-STEM ventures
The few social science spinouts that do emerge often take very different forms. They might be service-based, social enterprises with a focus on social impact over rapid growth, or software platforms rooted in humanities research. Since they don’t often have patents or deep tech IP, universities sometimes struggle to understand how to handle them or support them. A Technology Transfer Officer noted that ventures outside the typical technology transfer remit can sit outside the usual support system — so much so that they may not even be recognised as spinouts, falling through policy cracks. Moreover, these ventures might need different early funding, such as seed philanthropy or public sector contracts instead of VC and different mentorship — such as experts in education markets or policy change.
Gender and non-STEM
Female academics are more prevalent in social sciences and humanities. If those fields aren’t spinning out companies at the same rate, that inherently limits female participation in spinouts. Encouraging commercialisation in non-STEM fields could thus indirectly increase the proportion of female founders. However, it is not simply a matter of pushing more humanities professors to start companies, it requires broadening the concept of a spinout. For example, a new educational curriculum or a digital archive platform can be spun out as a venture, but success might be measured in impact or revenue, not in valuations. Some universities, such as the University of Oxford through its Social Ventures programme, are starting to provide such support, often structuring such companies as social enterprises or hybrids.
Policy attention
The Independent Review and most discourse on spinouts understandably focus on high-tech, high-growth companies. But there is a case to be made for nurturing social science spinouts for societal impact.
The HESA Spinout Register provides a vital window into this diversity of academic disciplines. By categorising companies by Research Excellence Framework (REF) Main Panels, the Register provides the evidence needed to show that spinout activity is not limited to STEM disciplines, but also spans the SHAPE disciplines too. This formal recognition is a necessary first step in legitimising non-STEM commercialisation pathways and ensuring these ventures are no longer ‘invisible’ to policymakers.
International comparisons
Internationally, Britain can find successful blueprints for broadening the definition of success in the spinout ecosystem. For instance, the Netherlands has strong social enterprise incubators and even their definition of valorisation includes non-patent impact. In the UK, Research England’s Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) could potentially be channelled to support non-STEM commercialisation more. It’s notable that a dedicated ARC (Accelerating Research & Commercialisation) Accelerator was piloted for social sciences in recent years, but interviewees mentioned it faced funding uncertainty. Ensuring continuity and support for these initiatives is important for inclusivity.
Singapore provides another good example of elevating SHAPE through its National Graduate Research Innovation Programme. By committing nearly $500 million to social science research with an explicit mandate for commercialisation, Singapore views human-centric innovation as a high-value national priority rather than a secondary impact. The model of mandatory interdisciplinary ‘co-founding’ pairs social scientists with technical experts from the outset, ensuring that SHAPE-led ventures are equipped with the technical rigour and market-readiness usually reserved for STEM spinouts.
Recommendation: Embed commercialisation into teaching and learning
Universities should move from an ‘opt-in’ to an ‘opt-out’ model for commercialisation training into both STEM and SHAPE programmes, from undergraduate to PhD. This structural change will capture high-potential researchers who currently consciously or unconsciously self-select out of entrepreneurship. Alongside this, specific ‘Entrepreneurial Research Experience Placements’ should be created for undergraduates to work inside active spinouts, demystifying the process at the earliest stage of their careers.
Recommendation: Create a distinct toolkit for SHAPE founders
Founders in SHAPE disciplines require a different support architecture than their STEM counterparts. Placing them in STEM accelerators is often not helpful, or can be actively harmful to their spinout journey if it wastes time and resources. Instead, programmes must be designed to teach SHAPE founders the technical and business rigour they may lack, such as financial modelling and productisation.
Case study: Clare Daly — Founder, Dynamigo
Clare Daly is the Founder of Dynamigo, an educational technology spinout from the University of Strathclyde, rooted in her background as a practice-based educational psychologist. Dynamigo provides a dynamic assessment platform to identify and nurture individuals’ learning potential.
Clare’s journey began seven years ago, but she faced immediate friction because she sat within the Humanities faculty. Unlike fields such as engineering or computer science, where commercialisation is normalised, Clare found that in her field, commercialisation was often viewed as a ‘dirty word’ and that there was an expectation that psychologists should give things away for free.
Clare is currently finalising negotiations where the university will take a 20% equity stake. However, she notes that the biggest bottleneck wasn’t the lawyers or the Technology Transfer Office, but negotiating her release time from her academic department, which lacked experience in handling such requests compared to STEM faculties.
As a female founder with three children, Clare highlights the domestic penalties women often face, noting that homework and family life limit her ability to attend evening networking events or move at the same pace as founders without those responsibilities. She also points out systemic flaws in the grant system designed to help people like her. For example, she secured a grant from Scottish Enterprise but discovered she had to pay for costs upfront and reclaim them later. For a cash-strapped founder, this cash-flow gap can make grants inaccessible.
Clare observes that the current ecosystem is skewed toward sectors such as health tech, leaving ‘human-centric’ tech businesses like hers struggling for recognition. She argues that auditors and investors need to look at what humanities founders do bring, such as a deep understanding of people and user experience, rather than focusing on their lack of technical or business knowledge.
05) Considering compounding barriers to success
Barriers to entry are not uniform; they are compounded by geography and race, creating a ‘haves versus have-nots’ ecosystem.
Regional disparities: the Golden Triangle versus the rest
Britain’s innovation landscape has long been concentrated in the Golden Triangle of London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Since 2011, four of the top five universities by number of spinouts produced can be found there. The Golden Triangle benefits from a virtuous cycle: large concentrations of research funding, established TTOs, dense networks of investors and a track record that attracts more talent.
Concerted efforts have been made in recent years to address this imbalance and boost spinout creation rates in other regions. The Northern Arc, for example, has gained traction with the help of Northern Gritstone. In the most recent academic year, the Northern Arc’s four research-intensive universities produced 19 spinouts, collectively the highest of any regional cluster. A TTO officer from a northern university pointed out that, “prior to Northern Gritstone’s launch in 2022, only £28 million of VC funding was invested in spinouts in the North annually. Since then, we have co-invested £380 million.”
The intersection of race and gender
Female founders who also belong to other under-represented groups, such as ethnic minorities or those from less affluent backgrounds, may face compounded challenges. Access to informal networks and social capital often helps founders, such as knowing someone who can advise on a business plan or make an introduction to an investor.
For black female academics, the challenges they face in progressing through the academic and entrepreneurial pipeline are even more pronounced. They encounter the combined difficulties of limited time due to gendered expectations, restricted access to professional networks because of racial barriers, and the high standards of proof required by academic institutions. As a result, they often need to demonstrate both exceptional technical expertise and leadership skills, which can slow their progress and increase the likelihood of burnout before their ventures are fully established.
Women and minorities have historically had less access to networks in the high-tech venture space. Black women represent 0.3% of professors (70 individuals) in British universities, despite making up about 2% of the population as a whole. That means that black women represent a statistical fraction of the professoriate and the latent pool of potential black female spinout founders remains largely untapped. This highlights a failure of the upstream academic pipeline to surface and support this talent. Female founders from ethnic minority backgrounds face additional barriers, both in terms of gender-based networks and access to informal warm introductions in the VC world. Between 2009 and 2019, only 10 black female founders in the UK secured VC funding — amounting to just 0.02% of total VC investment.
Case study: Nadia Ahrazem — Innovation and Entrepreneurship Manager, Imperial Enterprise Lab
Nadia Ahrazem is the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Manager at Imperial Enterprise Lab, where she leads WE Innovate, a dedicated accelerator for women-led startups. Over the last two years, she has witnessed a significant demographic shift: a surge in Early Career Researchers (ECRs), PhDs and postdocs wanting to commercialise their work. ECR-led teams now represent 32% of their applications, up from just 14% previously.
However, Nadia highlights that for women in academia, the decision to spin out is fundamentally a calculation of risk. Unlike their male counterparts, female researchers often shoulder disproportionate caregiving responsibilities. This makes the standard advice to take a sabbatical or attend evening networking events structurally impossible for many.
To combat this, Nadia and her team have redesigned the support infrastructure to de-risk entrepreneurship. Imperial’s WE Innovate programme now offers a £500 equity-free grant in addition to covering childcare or caring costs, allowing mothers to participate without financial penalty. They also moved sessions to lunchtimes rather than evenings to accommodate fixed schedules.
This pipeline approach of intervening early with tailored support, rather than just ‘confidence training’, is paying dividends. Nadia notes that as these women graduate from the early-stage WE Innovate programme, they are feeding into Imperial’s flagship, later-stage Venture Catalyst Challenge (VCC). “This year on our VCC we’ve seen almost parity in the top 10 teams amongst applicants between men and women,” Nadia says. “That’s because many of our WE Innovate teams have gone on to take part, which they would have never done if they didn’t take part in WE Innovate.”
Case study: Ruth Cousens — Founder, Thiscovery
Ruth Cousens is the Founder of Thiscovery, a spinout from the University of Cambridge focused on social sciences and healthcare. The genesis of the company was unique because her Co-Founders were determined to find a way to retain influence over the commercialisation of their IP without benefiting financially from the philanthropically-funded research that underpinned it. For this reason they ruled out receiving equity in the new company individually.
This ethical stance created immediate structural hurdles. They couldn’t form a standard commercial entity easily, and not-for-profit structures restricted the potential for investment. They settled on a company limited by shares owned by non-profits, with founder shares placed in a trust. This complex structure, designed to align with their values, caused significant headaches; Ruth notes that tax complications regarding the trust added six weeks to the process, and lawyers were often ‘baffled’ by their non-traditional approach.
While they had significant support from the university’s commercialisation arm, Cambridge Enterprise, including a helpful two-year royalty holiday, Ruth found that the university’s internal procurement systems were less well-adapted to spinouts seeking to continue close collaboration with former colleagues.
Ruth also highlights a cultural barrier specific to the social sciences: the perception among colleagues that commercialisation is inherently suspicious. She notes that while a biologist might see a pharmaceutical partnership as a standard path to impact, her social science peers often view commercial work with pharmaceutical clients as ethically compromised. She argues that there is a “gap in the market” for patient capital for businesses like hers that will grow steadily through organic revenue rather than the “hockey stick” growth demanded by traditional VCs.
06) Improving mentorship and navigating bias in the early stages
Even when a female founder overcomes the time and structural barriers, they face significant operational friction and financial bias at the pre-seed stage.
Access to finance at the proof of concept stage
Access to funding is the lifeblood of any startup, and for spinouts the critical shortage is often at the very early proof of concept stage. The Government’s recent allocation of £40 million over five years for proof of concept projects through UKRI and Innovate UK was intended to address this gap. But many research participants panned this amount as insufficient. Spread nationwide, it equates to roughly £8 million per year across all universities — “a ridiculous figure that will have no measurable impact,” according to one investor active in spinouts.
A recurring critique identified through this research is that what funds do exist are spread too thinly. Many universities have small internal seed funds, typically offering modest £20,000–£50,000 grants, often just enough for a few months’ work.
University-TTO dynamics
A common refrain from founders is that TTO processes are slow and bureaucratic. Legal reviews, conflict-of-interest committees and IP licence negotiations can continue for months, frustrating founders eager to move fast. One founder noted that after dealing with their TTO, “I understand why people try to spin out around the university instead of through it.”
Another dynamic is the balance between providing support and exerting control. Founders appreciate when TTOs actively mentor or connect them to investors. But sometimes this can seem overbearing, such as insisting on particular management hires or being protective of the technology to the point of inhibiting pivot or risk-taking by the startup.
Post-incorporation support gaps
Nearly all founders who participated in this research agreed that support often drops off after incorporation. Universities and incubators put considerable focus on helping researchers form a company, but once the company is legally established, the founding team can find itself cut adrift. One founder described their early growth phase as “stumbling in the dark: after the spinout formation, the helpful hands disappeared.”
Addressing bias in the investment process
Mentorship and peer networks remain among the most highly-rated interventions by female founders. However, to be truly effective, these programmes must evolve beyond a ‘deficit model’ (which focuses primarily on building a founder’s confidence) to a ‘strategic model’ that provides high-level operational expertise and tackles systemic bias.
Female founders report a mix of experiences. On the one hand, many challenges they face are the same ones male founders face. On the other hand, there is evidence of bias in the investment process. Women founders can be treated differently by VCs, such as getting asked more risk-focused questions, being underestimated, facing tougher scrutiny or dismissive attitudes.
Research has found that female founders are asked prevention questions — those focused on risks and losses — about 2.3 times more often than male founders. Male founders, meanwhile, tend to receive more promotion questions — focused on aspirations and potential gains. In addition, compared to male founders, women are interrupted 4.7 times more frequently during pitch presentations, they are asked 2.1 times more questions about personal commitments and family plans, and female founders report spending an average of 7.4 months fundraising, versus 5.2 months for male counterparts.
The need for sponsor-based mentorship
A consistent theme in this research was the importance of networks, namely, connecting women to mentors, entrepreneurial peers and role models. Female founders tend to benefit from both mixed-gender networks and women-centric ones. Some universities have launched mentorship circles pairing aspiring women founders with successful alumni or industry leaders. These efforts, though relatively new, are crucial in building confidence and providing guidance.
Recommendation: Incentivise commercialisation as a promotion metric
In many social science disciplines, commercialisation is viewed with suspicion, and traditional impact — such as publications and citations — remains central to the REF. To change the culture, universities should formally recognise entrepreneurial outputs — such as IP creation and social enterprise formation — as a factor in promotion criteria. Interviews for this research indicate that by validating commercial success as academic success, institutions can dismantle the stigma that currently prevents many female academics in these fields from pursuing spinout opportunities.
Recommendation: Move beyond ‘deficit model’ mentorship
Mentorship programmes must stop focusing on ‘fixing’ women’s confidence and start focusing more on access to capital and technical expertise. A National Founder Exchange could, for example, link female founders with experienced commercial CEOs who can teach operational scaling. This must be coupled with access to inclusive investors who are trained to recognise bias in their own questioning, shifting from ‘prevention’ questions (focusing on risk) to ‘promotion’ questions (focusing on growth). Crucially, support must shift from short six-week sprints to 12-24 month programmes that help guide founders safely through the ‘valley of death’.
Box 3. How the Invest in Women Taskforce is rebalancing the investment landscape
Initiatives such as the Invest in Women Taskforce are also seeking to drive systemic change in the investment landscape by putting more capital in the hands of female investors as women are twice as likely to invest in other women. Yet as women hold just 15% of senior investment roles, a cycle continues wherein capital flows predominantly to male-led businesses. The IWT is driving change by convening a funding pool to be deployed via female-led investment managers into female and mixed businesses.
07) Conclusion
Since the Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies was published in 2023, the UK’s spinout landscape is undoubtedly shifting. The Wild West of equity negotiations is being tamed, and a consensus on fairer terms is beginning to take root. However, as this report demonstrates, policy reform on paper does not always equate to cultural change in the laboratory.
For female academic entrepreneurs, the journey remains fraught with friction. This is not because of a lack of ambition or innovation — but because of persistent, systemic barriers that disproportionately make life harder for female academic entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs.
This report challenges the prevailing model that seeks to ‘fix’ female founders through confidence training and mentorship alone. While these are valuable, they are insufficient against structural barriers. These include the time poverty trap caused by asymmetric caregiving loads; the career risks of pausing academic tracks; attrition in the STEM pipeline and a lack of transparency about the opportunities and benefits of a STEM career; and an ecosystem that does not know how to properly support social sciences, humanities and arts disciplines, where women are strongly represented.
To truly bridge the gap, this report shows how we must move beyond standardising term sheets to standardising opportunity. This means practically addressing the division of domestic responsibilities, which prevent women from devoting sufficient time to their venture. Universities can aid this, such as by introducing ‘Commercialisation Fellowships’ that buy out teaching and administrative time so that entrepreneurs can focus on their ventures. Alongside this, STEM pathways such as Innovate UK’s ICURe should be expanded.
At the same time, bridging this gap also involves increasing transparency about how STEM degrees serve as the primary entry point for the high-growth sectors targeted by the Industrial Strategy; widening the definition of what an investable spinout looks like beyond deep-tech STEM; and ensuring that data transparency makes the invisible ‘leaky pipeline’ visible to policymakers.
If the Government is to deliver its Mission for Growth and secure the UK’s position at the frontier of the global technological revolution, it cannot continue to leave the potential of half the UK’s academic workforce untapped. The recommendations in this report offer a pathway to a spinout ecosystem that is not only faster and fairer, but genuinely inclusive.
08) Methodology and acknowledgements
The report is based on qualitative research conducted in 2025, alongside a desk-based review of research and policy documents relating to female founders. It is designed to capture the lived experiences of female academic entrepreneurs and the strategic perspectives of the professionals who support them. This qualitative methodology seeks to identify the specific cultural and operational barriers that persist following the 2023 Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies. The research employed a survey and semi-structured interviews, with over 40 stakeholders providing feedback on their experiences. This included founders and ecosystem supporters.
Founders: Female founders, co-founders and CEOs who have spun out (or are currently spinning out) ventures from British universities. These participants represented a diverse range of disciplines, including from STEM and SHAPE disciplines.
Ecosystem supporters: A broad range of experts including Technology Transfer Officers and university commercialisation directors, VCs and seed fund managers focusing on deep tech and university IP, advisory organisations and specialised startup accelerators, and public sector leaders from funding bodies such as UK Research and Innovation and Innovate UK.
The geographic scope of the research intentionally spanned the Golden Triangle (Oxford, Cambridge, London) as well as stakeholders across the UK, such as the ‘Northern Arc’, Scotland, and the South West to identify regional disparities in access to capital and support.
Interviews followed a semi-structured format designed to probe beyond ‘confidence-based’ explanations for gender gaps. Key areas of inquiry included:
Understanding the real-world impact of the Independent Review on equity splits and process transparency;
Investigating the funding gap between initial research and commercial viability;
Analysing how university stakes affect founder motivation and long-term retention;
Exploring why current commercialisation models often fail to support ‘human-centric’ or social science ventures.
The Entrepreneurs Network and Barclays would like to thank the following individuals and organisations for their contributions in writing this report and their support of the Female Founders Forum project: Christine Madla Angeles, Nadia Ahrazem, Nicola Banks, Joanna Berry, Fabio Bianchi, Barbara Blaney, Ed Bussey, Alison Chappell, Ruth Cousens, Clare Daly, Suzanne Eldridge, Chris Fellingham, Juliet Gouldman, Danielle Jenkins, Duncan Johnson, Riam Kanso, Miles Kirby, Alessandro Philip Maiano, Hamish McAlpine, Amy Morgan, Mark Neild, Amal Osman, Kaylee Shurety, Tony Soteriou, Tomas Coates Ulrichsen, Charlotte Waugh, Stuart Wilkinson, Andrew Williamson and Wenmiao Yu.
Special thanks are also due to Anastasia Bektimirova for help in researching and drafting sections of this report during her time at The Entrepreneurs Network.