International Women’s Day 2024

Today marks International Women’s Day – a movement dedicated to creating an equal world. The theme for this year is ‘Inspire Inclusion’ and the aim is to campaign for a world which is more inclusive for women and underrepresented groups.

Whilst the day celebrates the achievements of women, it also serves as a call for change to promote women’s equality and strive for a gender equal world, as well as encouraging the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) more broadly. The 2023 Rose Review into Female Entrepreneurship demonstrated that up to £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as UK men.

BlackRock’s 2023 report on ‘Lifting financial performance by investing in women’ states that rather than the over- or under-representation of gender, it is the diversity that is important in workplaces. In their report it stated companies with the most diverse workforces outperformed their country and industry group peers by 29% on average per year and companies close to parity across key roles have outperformed the companies further away from parity in the same roles over recent years.

Looking at the wider UK business landscape, reports state that over 150,000 new companies were established by women in the UK – more than twice as many as in 2018. All female-led businesses in 2022 in the UK represented 20% of all businesses in the UK, up from 16% in 2018.

When looking at the disparity seen with the gender funding gap, an Annual Report from the Female Founders Forum – a project of The Entrepreneurs Network and Barclays – stated that just 3.5% of equity investment for H1 2023 went to female-led businesses, while 85.1% went to male-led firms and 11.4% went to start-ups co-led by women and men.

Research from HM Treasury has found that the gender gap accounts for around 1.1 million missing businesses, demonstrating the opportunity for a further £250 billion if the right entrepreneurial environment, resources and incentives were presented for female business leaders.

With more women founding businesses than ever before, it is key that support and efforts are focused on allowing female founders to realise their potential and create thriving enterprises, alongside incentivising more women to become investors and place more resources into entrepreneurship education.

At NorthEdge, we are committed to enhancing diversity efforts across all underrepresented groups in our business and our portfolio – because we know it’s the right thing to do and because we know it generates more value for stakeholders. We recognise that before you can build a diverse business you have to create an inclusive culture. Therefore, we are focused on creating an environment where all our people can thrive, seeking out diversity of background, experience, ideas and opinions and hire based on culture and values.

Our mission is that every investment we make will have a positive impact.

On speaking about inclusion at NorthEdge, Partner Lucie Mills said: “The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is Inspire Inclusion, and our aim is to keep challenging ourselves to do better and use our voice in the industry to share best practice with peers and the wider community. Whilst we have made great progress, we know there is still more to do. Our ESG committee ensure we continue to improve the impact we have on our business, portfolio, and community. Collectively, the Private Equity industry has the power to drive positive and sustainable change that will benefit our communities, our businesses, and the wider economy.”

When looking across our portfolio at NorthEdge, we are proud to have backed a diverse range of CEOs, with female-led businesses across a range of sectors including Total Fitness, Correla, Distology, Meet, ramarketing, Torbay Pharmaceuticals and Contollo. You can hear from some of them directly in our Beyond the Capital podcast, where they have shared insights on their background, experiences, and their journey to where they are today.

We have also spoken with women in leadership roles across our technology and healthcare sectors, highlighting the importance of role models within STEM; harnessing diverse talent and why developing key policies matter, in light of International Day of Women & Girls in Science.

So how do we continue to build and encourage more diverse workforces?

Currently, NorthEdge has 29% female colleagues and 9% ethnic minority colleagues. Across our portfolio, 100% have female representation in the senior leadership team, with 45% with ethnic minority SLT representation, and, of the businesses where we are the lead investor, 29% of CEOs are female.

Whilst we have made great progress, we know there is still more to do to achieve parity in leadership teams, in our portfolio and in the business community more broadly. To play our part in continuing to make progress, we are focussed on:

Organising training to ensure we create an inclusive culture for all colleagues at NorthEdge and across our portfolio
Continuing to prioritise the mental wellbeing of our colleagues through the organisation of events and our partnership with Sanctus
Sharing learnings and best practice through a range of resources and podcasts
Running several initiatives to encourage a more diverse pipeline of talent into the Private Equity industry
Participating in events and initiatives with organisations such as 6% Club, 10,000 Black Interns Programme, NorthEdge’s Private Equity Challenge, Andy’s Man Club, and Smart Works

At NorthEdge we take our responsibilities seriously – as both employers and investors. The work we do to promote DE&I across our business, our portfolio and our market continues to be a fundamental element to our success. We use both extensive in-house knowledge and draw on external experts to continuously challenge ourselves and improve on our DE&I performance, building better businesses, and industries, as a result.

In recognition of International Women’s Day, and to celebrate all of our leaders who are catalysts for change, we have donated to Smart Works at their Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham centres.

To support the day further, we have gathered a set of resources below to highlight and encourage more workplaces and individuals to build inclusive cultures across their networks, learn why gender equality is not just about women, and discuss how we can all support one another to achieve a better future.

Resources

Book – Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Book – The Authority Gap by Ann Sieghart
Book – Why Women Are Poorer Than Men and What We Can Do About It by Annabelle Williams
Ted Talk – How to design gender bias out of your workplace by Sara Sanford
Podcast – Her Own Boss

Charities

Young Women’s Trust

Young Women’s Trust – offer a free service that provides support for women aged 18 to 30 to unlock their potential by building skills, strong mental health and opening up opportunities. Their Work It Out programme supports young women with CV advice, job application support and six free one-to-one coaching sessions.

Smart Works

Smart Works – a dressing and coaching service designed to help women be the best version of themselves at a crucial moment in their lives, when they are seeking employment. The women who come to Smart Works are referred from Job Centres, mental health charities, women’s refuges, homeless shelters, the prison service, care service and youth organisations.

Girls Who Code

Girls Who Code – is an international non-profit organisation working to close the gender gap in technology by teaching girls computer science, bravery, and sisterhood!