If you’re serious about growth – you need to be serious about women like Trinny Woodall
KWhat do you think of when you imagine a British female entrepreneur? Trinny Woodall or Deborah Meaden, who founded Trinny London after a long television career? Dragons’ Lair? Maybe it’s Anita Roddick, who founded The Body Shop in the seventies. You’d probably struggle to name a female entrepreneur beyond these examples, and you certainly wouldn’t know if they could currently add more than £50bn of value to the British economy.
For Starmer and Reeves, growth was the sole focus, how to achieve growth, how to encourage it and how to reap the benefits. Get this right and the rest follows. More jobs means more tax revenue, and more tax revenue means more money to provide better services. Or so the argument goes. Various economic interventions have been hampered by a series of false starts, U-turns and dead ends, and growth in the UK has remained slow.
The UK has underperformed its peers over the last decade due to the impact of a series of shocks such as the pandemic, the 2022 energy crisis, Brexit and now the Iran war, leaving growth well below historical averages.
In his much-discussed article, Tony Blair further emphasized the idea that economic growth should be the government’s top priority. Blair said Labor was creating “headwinds, not tailwinds” for business through policies such as increasing employers’ national insurance, strengthening workers’ rights legislation, raising minimum wages and focusing on aspects of the net zero agenda.
He never pointed out the great potential that is being lost every day. If people are serious about growth, supporting scaling companies should be at the center of the discussion. And there are some companies that are shamefully overlooked right now: companies run by women. Help them grow and the Treasury can see money flowing into the economy.
New data from Women Are Good Business, supported by The Gender Index, suggests the figures could be extraordinary. The key finding is that if women-led businesses were scaled at the same rate as male-led businesses, £54.5 billion in revenue could be generated each year, generating £20.7 billion in revenue for the treasury. This is not a marginal gain. There may be a structural transformation in public finance.
The data also shows exactly where women-led companies are stopping growing at the same rate as male-led companies. At the micro level, women stand on their own feet: 22 percent of companies with 0-4 employees are made up of women, the rate of companies with 101-200 employees drops to 13.3 percent, and only 11 percent of companies with 301-400 employees are managed by women.
Research shows that women-led businesses are built for longevity, reinvesting profits rather than grabbing them quickly; They grow at a pace that prioritizes resilience over the fast money romanticized by venture capital
Closing the scaling gap in just the 51-200 employee range, also known as the critical mid-growth region, could create approximately 390,000 jobs. This means employment in productive, growing jobs, exactly the kind of jobs that regional economies can be built on.
The data had existed for years, scattered across reports and spreadsheets, waiting for those responsible to recognize it and take action. This situation is easily revealed: Women-powered businesses generate twice as much return on investment as their male-led counterparts, but less than 2 percent of venture capital reaches women. Space is not a problem. This is an economic opportunity; Supporting women should be part of the strategy.
Parliament has already done the work on what needs to change. The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has published its review of women’s entrepreneurship in 2025. Alongside existing tax cuts, she called for a Women’s Enterprise Investment Plan, which includes higher incentives specifically designed to provide funding for women-led businesses, a new Office of Women Business Ownership and a 10 per cent public procurement target for businesses backed by women.
Research shows that women-led businesses are built for longevity, reinvesting profits rather than grabbing them quickly; they are growing at a pace that prioritizes flexibility over the fast money romanticized by venture capital.
In a country that has been teetering between short-termism and stagnation for decades, this is exactly the entrepreneurial model that deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. These types of businesses provide the real stability needed to support the economy. And yet we have a system designed around the quick sale, the clean exit, the capital event, the founder cashing out, that is structurally blind to that kind of sustainable value. It certainly doesn’t reward.
Businesses built slowly and built to last will still employ people and pay taxes 20 years later. Types of businesses established by women. A woman who has been running a business for over 15 years; The founder who rose from his own kitchen and now employs 50 people, the entrepreneur whose exit may have been modest by City or venture capital standards but was transformative in every way.
Blair is right that the government should help businesses, not hinder their ability to grow. But we also need to look at undersold items as growth opportunities. If we support these entrepreneurs we could unlock £20.7bn a year and hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is the scale of the reward and will provide consistent, large returns.
