Do men make better entrepreneurs than women? A wealth of academic studies and the successes of the women who make up the Female Founders Forum would suggest not. Yet we know that a significant proportion of funding — be it at seed or Series C+ level — goes towards male founded or led companies.

In 2016, the entrepreneurs network, with the support of Barclays, began addressing a specific problem which is informed by academic evidence: why too few women-led businesses reach the same economic scale as that achieved by male-led companies.