The government-founded High Growth Enterprise Taskforce is tackling the high-growth business entrepreneur gap, as they today reveal stats highlighting gender and regional disparities across the UK. The Taskforce set out an interactive map of the UK, and the Taskforce’s plans to tackle the gap on March 10. The group will make recommendations to Government on how to achieve the target of increasing the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030 – equivalent to 600,000 entrepreneurs. The Taskforce - established last summer - is particularly focused on increasing the number of women-led high-growth businesses in regions outside of London. It is identifying the main barriers in accessing high-growth capital, influencing high-growth investors and the wider business community, and establishing areas to stimulate regional opportunities based on robust data and engagement.

The data highlights the barriers to women. Although companies founded by men and women work in the same sectors, and high growth enterprises (HGEs) with at least one female founder have higher turnover (£125m v £93.6m), the evidence indicates that they receive around 60% of the funding companies with at least one male founder receive on average. In the last year HGEs with at least one female founder received on average £5.78m per funding compared to £9.55m for HGEs with at least one male founder. regional disparities are also found - of around 44,000 HGEs less than 3% are in the North East - 10 times less than the nearly 31% that are in London. The North East also has the least women-founded OECD-definition HGEs - none of them were founded either entirely or mostly, by women. There are only five companies that have at least one female founder.