By Rachel Sterling, Chief Marketing Officer at Identity Digital
The most meaningful measure of progress isn’t what’s already been accomplished, but the potential that lies ahead. International Women’s Day embodies this idea: a moment to celebrate women’s achievements while looking squarely at the opportunities still to come. Women are making meaningful gains every day, but the distance between where we are and where we need to be for a genuinely equitable economy remains significant.
The numbers tell a complicated story. In the United States, women now own 39% of all businesses and launched 49% of new ventures in 2024, the highest rate on record. In the UK, 1.8 million women run incorporated or self-employed ventures, with close to half of early-stage entrepreneurs now being women. Yet only 14% of UK employer SMEs are women-led, down from 19% just three years ago. Women are starting businesses in record numbers, and the systems around them are failing to keep pace.
The funding gap makes this plain. Female founders secured just 1.9% of UK venture capital in 2024, while male founders received nearly six times more early-stage funding. Only 0.05% of women-led firms in the UK achieve fast-growth status, compared to 0.29% of those led by men. This isn’t a reflection of ambition or capability, it’s a reflection of where capital flows and who controls it.
Building from the inside
So how do we close these gaps? Not by waiting for the economy to reform itself, but by making deliberate choices within the organisations we already lead. As corporate leaders, we control procurement budgets, investment decisions, and hiring pipelines. Every one of those is a lever.
A competitive economy is one where talent and ideas determine outcomes, not where an entrepreneur’s gender determines her access to capital. That means examining who sits on our supplier shortlists. It means structuring parental leave and flexible working so that entrepreneurial women aren’t forced to choose between caregiving and scaling a business. It means investing in women-led ventures not as a goodwill exercise but because the data bears it out: women-led companies in the UK generate higher average revenues than their male-led counterparts, and the insolvency rate is significantly lower.
None of this is about charity or special treatment. It’s about fixing systems that were built without half the population in mind and recognising that this work falls on everyone in a position to change those systems. When corporate leaders, regardless of gender, commit to equitable pay, transparent promotion pathways, and diversified supplier networks, they aren’t doing women a favour. They’re building more resilient businesses.
The Rose Review estimated that if women in the UK started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, it could add £250 billion to the economy. That figure isn’t aspirational, it’s the cost of the status quo. The talent is here. The ambition is here. The question is whether the rest of the economy will catch up.
This International Women’s Day, the most powerful thing any of us can do isn’t to celebrate progress in the abstract. It’s to look at the decisions we make this week. Who we hire, who we fund, who we buy from, and ask whether those decisions are building the economy we say we want.
