Tameeka Smith resigned as director of a well-known youth charity in 2019 after realising that being her own boss was more important to her than the security of being an employee.
Now the founder and director of Trimenco CIC, a nonprofit training, mentoring and coaching company, Smith has never been happier. “My wake-up moment was when the voice inside my head saying, ‘It’s time to leave’ was suddenly louder than the one saying, ‘You’ve got bills to pay,’” she said.
Smith realised that she needed autonomy to achieve her potential.
Starting her own business is the best decision she has ever made, Smith says. “I am now the conductor of my own orchestra, fully in the driving seat of my own career and life.”
A record number of women are following the same path: more than 150,000 new businesses were started by women in 2022, a historic high. “All female”-led companies now represent more than 20.5% of all UK businesses, up from 16.7% in 2018.
Many say they have turned to entrepreneurship for freedoms they felt were not available to them in traditional workplaces. The Fawcett Society’s report for equal payday this year found UK women aged 40 and older will not experience the closure of the gender pay gap until after they reach state pension age. Another found that women hold only one in five commercial roles on the boards of Britain’s 350 largest listed companies.
“These statistics exemplify the outdated attitudes and glass ceilings that exist in mainstream workplaces,” says Ameena Hamid, who founded her own production company when she felt that she had no control and was not taken seriously in the theatre industry.
“Many women don’t want to wait for their workplace to catch up with modern attitudes, and that’s why they’re going it alone: as an entrepreneur they’re able to find success without waiting for permission.”
Zhin Kader founded a clothing line, Estéra Swim, and the podcast, Fashion Tweak, because she became fed up working for a fashion industry that reduced her “big ideas and capability” to “just fetching boxes for more senior colleagues”.
Kader says: “My drive to entrepreneurship emerged from a blend of personal values and frustrations with the traditional workplace. My time in the fashion industry, marked by ethical dilemmas and a lack of inclusivity, contrasted sharply with my autism-driven ethical compass.
“I was entry-level for many years, regularly made redundant, and it was only when I pursued being more of my own boss and becoming a design consultant that I realised I was extremely competent and able to grow.”
Rebekah Lloyd, a women’s health consultant and the founder of This Independent Life, became an entrepreneur after feeling she was not supported by her employer while suffering a serious health problem. “The experience lit a fire in my gut that I would no longer allow a workplace to influence my life,” she said. “I wanted autonomy, freedom and flexibility over my time, the ability to create and build something from the ground up that I was genuinely passionate about.
“I didn’t want to have to follow the rules for the sake of it, to fit into a box and do what I’m told – to not challenge the way things are done and not rock the boat,” she added.
“I didn’t want to have my creativity and ideas shut down, and continually be told ‘no’, or when they were considered to have to jump through 100 hoops to even have them listened to or taken seriously.”
But progress is slow: the Treasury estimates 1.1m new businesses, and up to £250bn of new value could be added to the British economy if women in the UK started and scaled new ventures at the same rate as men do.
Given that women are as successful as men in sustaining a business once established, with 73% of entrepreneurs of both sexes running businesses older than 3.5 years, according to the government’s Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, the question is: what is preventing even more women becoming entrepreneurs?
Rebekah Capon, the managing director of the social entrepreneurship charity Hatch Enterprise, says: “If you’re a woman, there’s a whole host of systemic barriers that make it far easier for you to fail rather than succeed in the entrepreneurship sphere, with added layers of difficulty for women facing additional marginalisation through race, disability, sexuality, and more.”
Getting a business venture off the ground as a woman is notoriously hard work, and Capon says only 1% of venture capital in the UK ends up in businesses led by women. “You’re also far less likely to have access to advantageous professional networks.”
When coupled with unrealistic depictions of entrepreneurship glorifying the ‘hustle culture’, women can be put off from starting their own business, Capon says, even though “the reality is that entrepreneurship can offer a great deal of flexibility and self-determination which is often not afforded women in the traditional workplace.”
Martha Bennett started her business, Ludo Tutors, in 2017.
“I literally Googled ‘how to start a business’ and taught myself how to code,” she said. “I learned to be agile, scrappy and prepared to take some knocks – and we now have over 150 brilliant tutors on our books.
“Funding has always been a challenge for me: I’ve been reluctant to search for external funding because the business feels so personal. But I really enjoyed networking: the business world has felt far more welcoming and encouraging than one might think,” she adds. “It’s fun.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, businesses led by women were hit particularly hard. Since then, however, the recovery has led to some benefits for female workers, with flexible and remote working becoming more widely accepted.
Anne Boden, the founder of Starling Bank and the chair of the government’s Women-led high-growth enterprise taskforce, believes very strongly: “We don’t need to fix women; we just need to make sure they get the same opportunities as men.
“The majority of women are not seeking support but simply the opportunities that men get. While it may seem that there are initiatives for entrepreneurial women everywhere you look, when you look closely, these initiatives seem to be clustered in specific industries or locations.”
Tech, stem and biotechnology companies are most likely to transform the economy. But Boden says only 2% of venture capital funding to these companies goes to women-only teams, while 85% goes to men-only teams.
“High growth comes from high spend and a long investment period before profitability. As women will suffer financial gaps throughout their lives, it is not surprising that fewer women have the financial resources to support themselves and take the plunge into entrepreneurship.”
Juggling domestic demands with entrepreneurship is also daunting. Abi Read turned her hobby of pottery-making into a career last year when she resigned from her job in publishing and opened her own studio.
Now 34 weeks pregnant, Read has found a “complete lack” of support for new parents in entrepreneurship. “My own company is too young to pay me a maternity wage and as I will need to keep on working to some degree, I’m not even entitled to statutory maternity pay,” she says. “This is going to take a toll on us as family but also on the business as I can’t afford to pay a full-time manager to take over from me.”
Katrina Sale, the head of the Female Founders Forum, says efforts to encourage women into entrepreneurial life need to start far younger: “Still too many girls grow up thinking that entrepreneurship isn’t something for them.
“Achieving gender equality in entrepreneurship won’t happen if it’s an after-thought – it needs to be encouraged from an early age.”
