Hello, Denyse here, and welcome to We Are Mimosa, where we write about women’s leadership, strategy, and purpose — and the women building something hopeful and meaningful with all three.
In 2019, HM Treasury was told that closing the female entrepreneurship gap could add £250 billion to the UK economy. In 2025, a cross-party parliamentary committee made 26 specific recommendations to make it happen. In 2026, 2,225 women confirmed - through the Rise Report, one of the largest grassroots studies of UK female entrepreneurship ever conducted - that the barriers identified seven years ago are still there.
On Tuesday, I wrote about what those 2,225 women are building and how they define success. The Rise Report captures the experiences of founders who collectively generate £1 billion in annual turnover and employ 9,300 people. Its most striking finding - the Four Ss of Success - reveals that women are far more commercially ambitious than the ecosystem assumes: 53% define success through financial stability and profitability, and nearly four in ten are building to scale or exit. If you haven’t read that piece, I’d encourage you to - it’s the context for everything that follows.
Today, the other side of the story. If we’ve known what women need for seven years, why has so little changed?
In March 2019, HM Treasury published the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship. It was the foundational document - the one that established the economic case with clarity and force.
The headline finding was stark. If women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, it could add up to £250 billion to the UK economy. Adjusting for inflation, that figure is now £310 billion.
The review identified three structural priorities:
Greater investment in female-led enterprises
Enhanced support for female founders with caregiving responsibilities
And improved access to entrepreneurship through local networks, role models, and mentoring.
Annual progress reports followed through to 2023. There was activity - over 150,000 new all-women-led companies founded by 2022, more than double the number before the Rose Review. The Investing in Women Code grew from 12 founding signatories to over 190. Rose Review partners provided more than 800,000 opportunities for female entrepreneurs to access support.
But the underlying number - the one that matters most - barely moved. Less than 2% of venture capital went to all-female founding teams when the Rose Review was published. By 2024, it was still 2%. By 2025, it had fallen to 1.3%.
The initiatives were real. The structural change was not.
In 2024, the Invest in Women Taskforce was established - an industry-led, government-backed initiative focused on closing the gender funding gap. Rachel Reeves, as Chancellor, wrote the foreword to its first annual report, published in December 2025 under the title The Missing Slice.
The Taskforce’s achievements are significant. A funding pool of £635 million committed - one of the largest in the world dedicated to female-founded businesses. Partners including Barclays, M&G, British Business Bank, BGF, Aviva, Morgan Stanley, Visa Foundation, and Nationwide. A Women Backing Women Fund of Funds. Capital beginning to be deployed across sectors from technology and health to green innovation and creative industries.
I want to be clear. The people behind this work are doing something that matters. The co-chairs, Debbie Wosskow OBE and Hannah Bernard OBE, have built something real through extraordinary commitment and persistence.
But the Taskforce’s own conclusion tells you where the limit is. It calls for more capital committed to the funding pool, bolder industry commitments, greater transparency around who receives VC and SEIS funding, and greater awareness of how to start, fund, and scale businesses. The language is aspirational: “we need to see,” “we want,” “we also want to drive.”
What is absent is a strategy. The Taskforce can convene, fund, and advocate. What it cannot do - because it is industry-led, not government-led - is redesign the system. It can identify the missing slice. It cannot compel anyone to serve it.
For that, you need government.
In October 2025, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee published its report on female entrepreneurship. It is the most comprehensive parliamentary examination of the subject to date, drawing on extensive written and oral evidence from founders, investors, academics, and representative bodies.
The committee’s findings were unambiguous. The structural barriers identified in the Rose Review in 2019 remained, in their words, “deeply embedded” six years later. The situation was, in several respects, getting worse rather than better. The committee described the government’s Industrial Strategy and SME Strategy as “deeply disappointing” for containing no specific measures to support female-led businesses.
The committee did something then prescribed twenty-six specific, actionable recommendations across four themes: access to finance, networks and support, caregiving and maternity, and financial education.
The three most structurally significant asks were:
A dedicated Female Entrepreneurship Strategy, published within twelve months;
A dedicated Minister and Office within the Department for Business and Trade, modelled on the US Office of Women’s Business Ownership;
And mandatory reporting by venture capital firms on the gender split of their deals, enforced by the Financial Conduct Authority with financial penalties.
These weren’t vague aspirations. They were structural. They would have created the institutional architecture - the strategy, the accountability, the transparency - that the Taskforce’s own conclusions implicitly call for but cannot deliver.
In January 2026, the government published its response. I’ve read it carefully, alongside the Industrial Strategy, the SME Strategy, the Budget, the Entrepreneurship Prospectus, and the Spring Forecast.
Of the 25 actionable recommendations the WEC made, not one was accepted outright. Eleven were refused. Seven were partially accepted - typically in principle but without the specific targets, timelines, or accountability mechanisms the committee had asked for. Four were deferred to the Parental Leave and Pay Review, which won’t report until January 2027. Zero were accepted with a substantive, measurable commitment.
The dedicated Female Entrepreneurship Strategy was refused. The dedicated Minister and Office were refused. The FCA mandate for VC reporting was refused. The Female Enterprise Investment Scheme - a proposed tax incentive to drive investment specifically into women-led businesses - was refused, on grounds of “complex design issues.” This was the same Budget that delivered what government described as the biggest shake-up of entrepreneur tax incentives in a generation, for the broader scale-up community.
The government’s position, stated plainly, is that female entrepreneurship should be “embedded in everyone’s agenda” rather than given a dedicated strategy.
I’ve looked at the documents where this embedding is supposed to be happening. The Industrial Strategy Advisory Council’s mandate letter - the operational machinery of the growth mission - does not mention women. The Entrepreneurship Prospectus, a 2.1 million character document about why founders should build in the UK, contains one sentence on female entrepreneurship. The Spring Forecast, delivered by the Chancellor two days after the Rise Report was published, does not mention women at all.
When a government says female entrepreneurship is on everyone’s agenda, you can test that claim against the documents where agendas are set. It isn’t there.
I want to be careful about how I say this, because I know that many people working on this - in the Taskforce, in the British Business Bank, in Innovate UK, in the communities and networks that support female founders every day - are doing genuine, important work.
But seven years after the Rose Review, the UK does not have a strategy for female entrepreneurship. Parliament asked for one. The government said no. The Rose Review’s three priorities in 2019 map directly onto the WEC’s four themes in 2025 - the same barriers, the same recommendations, restated with greater urgency and greater specificity, and declined with greater politeness.
The Rise Report - published two days before the Spring Forecast - confirms from the ground up what every document in this sequence has said from the top down. 2,225 women told the researchers what they need. The funding system scored 78% negative sentiment on public finance and 73% negative on private finance. One in seven founders cited loneliness and isolation as their biggest challenge. And yet, last week when the Chancellor stood up to describe Britain’s growth plan, support for female entrepreneurship was not part of the story she told.
This raises a question I want to explore in the next piece in this series: what happens when a country does have a strategy? When a government commits - with funding, with targets, with accountability - to treating female entrepreneurship as an economic imperative rather than a diversity footnote?
Because the international evidence exists. And it tells a very different story.
After a week spent reading government responses, I want to end with something that’s actually working.
Buy Women Built is a campaign and kitemark founded by Sahar Hashemi OBE - who also founded Coffee Republic and is quoted in the Rise Report on exactly the visibility gap I’ve been writing about. Her point: women aren’t short of talent or ideas. They’re short of being seen at the moment it matters most.
Buy Women Built represents over 2,800 women-founded brands in the UK, partnered with Ocado, Tesco, and Wholefoods. The premise is beautifully simple: make it easy for consumers to find and choose products made by women.
This week, I discovered She Grows Veg - a Suffolk business founded in 2023 by Kate Cotterill and Lucy Hutchings, selling more than 300 rare, open-pollinated heirloom seeds and aiming to introduce growers to long-lost seed varieties not found in shops. They’ve just secured their first retail listing on Ocado, featured on the Buy Women Built page, and joined the Ocado Roots programme for small businesses making their first move into retail.
It’s a small story. But it’s exactly the kind of infrastructure that the WEC says is missing at a systemic level - built from the ground up by women who got tired of waiting for the system to notice them.
I’ve been shopping Buy Women Built this week. You can too.
After a month of structural analysis - government, policy, the gap between evidence and action - I want to share something positive that restores the balance.
Earth Hope is a Substack by Amanda Royal, a former environmental journalist who covered wildfires, invasive species, water quality, and wildlife in California and Nevada. Her project is an experiment in solutions-based journalism, built on a simple observation: humanity already holds all the solutions to today’s environmental problems. What’s missing is the storytelling that makes them visible.
The newsletter focuses on biodiversity wins - restoring wetlands, restoring forests, battling invasive species, reintroducing keystone species, protecting oceans. Amanda writes with the pragmatism of someone who’s worked in the field and the generosity of someone who believes small actions compound into large results.
In a week where the world feels heavier than usual, Earth Hope is a reminder that people are building and restoring and making things work, quietly, persistently, in places the news cycle doesn’t reach. I find that genuinely hopeful and I hope you do too.
Four weeks in. The Rise Report series is taking shape — Tuesday features that celebrate what women are building, Friday digests that examine the systems around them. Next Tuesday: a founder who built something remarkable and told Parliament about it.
What resonated this week? What would you like to see explored in the next piece? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
See you Tuesday.
Denyse
This week on We Are Mimosa: Tuesday’s feature, “The Rise Report: How 2,225 Women Define Success,” is here. The companion publication, A Global Hinge Moment, continues to examine the geopolitical dimensions of purpose-led leadership.
Previous features: “Bobbi Brown’s Second Act: What Happens When a Woman Builds on Her Own Terms” here. The Starmer series: “Keir Starmer’s Mission on Violence Against Women: Purpose Without Foundation” here, “The Glass Cliff Prime Minister: Does Starmer Have a Woman Problem? here, and “Does Starmer Have a Misogyny Problem?” here.
The Rise Report is available at therisereport.co.uk. The Women and Equalities Committee report on Female Entrepreneurship (October 2025) is available at parliament.uk. The Invest in Women Taskforce’s annual report, The Missing Slice, is at investinwomentaskforce.org.
Buy Women Built is at buywomenbuilt.com. She Grows Veg is at shegrowsveg.co.uk.
Amanda Royal’s Earth Hope is on Substack here.
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