Tara Attfield-Tomes
Founder, The 51% Club
Tara Attfield-Tomes is a visibility strategist, founder, and Power Broker for female enterprise. With two decades of experience building visibility as a growth strategy for female founders and leaders, she now leads The 51% Club alongside a growing portfolio of advisory and speaking work.
The 51% Club is the UK’s home for ambitious female founders and leaders, with a core mission of getting more women-led businesses to £1 million and beyond. With 2,500+ members across multiple city hubs, it is built around four rooms: Grow, Scale, Exit, and Lead, supporting women at every stage of their working life.
Tara also chairs The Whole Point, a Treasury-backed initiative to increase capital flow to high-growth women-led businesses outside London, and sits on the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Community Forum. She has given evidence to Parliament in support of the Women and Equalities Committee’s Female Entrepreneurship report.
Her work sits at the intersection of visibility, wealth creation, and systemic change for women in business.
Why do you support the work of The Entrepreneurs Network?
For too long, supporting women in business has been treated as everyone's responsibility, which means that it’s no one's priority. I support The Entrepreneurs Network because I believe meaningful change has to come from the top down.
Policy that puts female founders at the centre doesn't just set the agenda; it sets the benchmark for quality of delivery across every region. Without that, we'll keep seeing patchy, underfunded, inconsistent support that fails women at the very moments they need it most.
Through The 51% Club, I see every day what's possible when women get the right room, the right resources, and the right backing. The Entrepreneurs Network's policy work is the top-down counterpart to that, and together, it's how we actually move the dial.
Why is the UK an attractive place to grow a business?
The UK has incredible entrepreneurial talent, world-class research institutions, and a culture that genuinely celebrates founders. And with schemes like EIS and SEIS offering some of the most generous tax incentives for early-stage investment in the world, the conditions for backing ambitious businesses are genuinely strong.
But attractiveness alone isn't enough; the question is whether the infrastructure matches the ambition. For female founders especially, the gap between potential and reality is still significant. The UK has everything it needs to be the best place in the world to start and scale a women-led business. We're just not there yet, and that's exactly why the policy work matters.