Drawing on three roundtables and a series of founder interviews, this TEN report, sponsored by the Jessica Vollman Foundation, sets out five barriers female founders face from start-up to scale: access to capital and investor bias, childcare, networks, finance and procurement, and international expansion. It argues that many are general SME problems that hit women harder because policy wasn't designed around founders' circumstances, from SEIS/EIS age limits to childcare rules built around salaried employment. It calls for modest fixes within existing frameworks, with progress judged by how easily founders can actually navigate the system rather than by how many initiatives are launched.
Female Founder Ambition Series Report