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A new report published this week by The Entrepreneurs Network, produced in partnership with Barclays, says current trends, female academic entrepreneurs in the UK will reach parity with men in spinning out companies until 2060.
The UK loves to congratulate itself on innovation.
We have world-class universities, globally admired research and a spinout ecosystem that, compared to many other countries, does a respectable job of turning ideas into companies. Ministers talk up ‘science superpower’ ambitions, vice-chancellors celebrate exits and investors marvel at the density of talent clustered around our campuses. And yet, when it comes to who actually gets to turn academic research into businesses, the system remains quietly and stubbornly skewed towards men.
A sobering verdict
A new report published this week by The Entrepreneurs Network, produced in partnership with Barclays, delivers a sobering verdict. On current trends, female academic entrepreneurs in the UK may not reach parity with their male counterparts in spinning out companies until 2060.
That is not a typo. That is an entire generation of innovation left waiting in the wings. At a reception in the Cholmondeley Room and Terrace of the Houses of Lords this week to announce the launch of the latest Female Founders Forum report, there was no shortage of female entrepreneurs.
For this male writer who has been to so many male-heavy conferences that they should all have been called Mansplaining conferences, it was refreshing to be in the minority for once. With a much better energy in the (Cholmondeley) room.
Spinouts and startups built on university intellectual property are a vital source of long-term economic growth. They dominate in deep tech, life sciences and emerging technologies where the UK has genuine global strengths.
Blind to realities faced by women
Successive governments have recognised this, pressuring universities to demand less equity, reduce bureaucratic drag and make it easier for academics to commercialise their work. Some progress has followed. But as this report makes clear, it has been too incremental, too uneven and too blind to the realities faced by women trying to navigate the system.
In 2023, fewer than 8% of UK spinouts had all-women founding teams, while more than three-quarters were all-male. Mixed teams filled the remaining gap. Those numbers have improved slightly in recent years, partly due to the Government’s Independent Review of University Spin-Out Companies, but the underlying structure remains unchanged.
Too many potential founders never even get to the starting line. The report is based on interviews with female academic entrepreneurs and others across the spinout ecosystem, many featured as case studies. Their experiences point to a familiar but still under-acknowledged truth.
The barriers women face are not about confidence or ambition. They are about how the system actually operates. Access to capital remains a glaring issue. Investment committees are still disproportionately male, shaping not only who gets funded but which ideas are deemed ‘commercial’.
Mentorship is often generic rather than tailored, focused on short-term confidence boosts instead of long-term operational scaling. And time, the most precious resource in academia, is in chronic short supply. As Jennifer Seig, Adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network, puts it:
“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 path continues to carry disproportionate risk.”
Caring responsibilties narrow opportunities
This ‘time poverty’ is not accidental. Much of the spinout ecosystem is built around evening networking, informal investor access and an assumption of uninterrupted availability. For founders with caring responsibilities, rarely men, this quietly but effectively narrows what feels possible.
The result is fewer spinouts, fewer funded ideas and a narrower innovation pipeline than the UK can afford. The economic cost is significant. Barclays estimates that dismantling the barriers faced by female founders could unlock up to £250 billion for the UK economy.
As Juliet Gouldman, Director at Barclays Business Banking, notes: ‘peer networks, accelerators and supportive communities matter, but systemic change matters more’. And that change requires coordination across universities, financial services and government.
One of the report’s most important contributions is its focus on specificity. Rather than treating women founders as a single category, it highlights how barriers differ by discipline and institutional support. In particular, founders in Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts (SHAPE) subjects face distinct challenges.
This is because their intellectual property is often non-patentable and poorly understood by traditional tech transfer structures.
To address this, the report sets out a clear slate of policy recommendations. These include improved, gender-disaggregated data collection on spinout equity and leadership; expanding proven programmes and introducing Commercialisation Fellowships that buy academics out of teaching so they can build companies without jeopardising their research careers.
Other proposals tackle cultural issues head-on: recognising commercialisation as a promotion metric alongside publications; moving entrepreneurship training to an opt-out model across degrees and redesigning accelerators to eliminate exclusionary networking norms.
None of this is radical
None of this is radical. All of it is overdue. The central message is simple. The UK does not have a shortage of female academic talent. It has a system that still treats commercial ambition as an optional extra, and a risky one, particularly for women.
Until universities, investors and policymakers align incentives with reality, the gender gap will persist. And if current trends continue, we already know how long that will take to fix. The question is whether the UK is content to wait until 2060… or whether it finally decides that innovation, like talent, should not come pre-filtered by gender.
As the female entrepreneurs (and this male writer) departed the House of Lords into a distinctly drab Westminster afternoon, it was tempting to look behind at the grandeur of the UK parliament with its numerous male statues and ponder who really is to blame for such an shameful situation.