The Inspiring Fifty UK awards, hosted by accelerateHER, opens nominations to spotlight women excelling in technology careers across the UK and showcase 50 incredible trailblazing leaders.

Ethnicity is a greater challenge than gender when establishing and growing a business according to new research from Santander UK and PRECIOUS, the UK’s longest standing online platform for ambitious women of colour.

For many businesses, the pandemic has been the biggest unwanted spanner in the works that will take some time to come back from. After working from home  for over a year, we can see first-hand the impact that the situation has had, especially for women.

When you are building a plane in the sky - startup speak for tricky innovation in a tough environment - things slip. In the case of fast-growing businesses, important people priorities and processes fall down the agenda. Diversity and inclusion is one of them. It can be deprioritised by default, in a race to stay afloat, pay your teams and spend time on what will get you where you need to go, quickly.

A recent study cited by a leading Fintech publication found that whilst 30% of the fintech workforce is female, only 17% of senior fintech roles are held by women and just over 5% of founders are women. These statistics are pretty shocking as Fintech is such a dynamic world of discovery and innovation.

Working while parenting has always been a balancing act, but the pandemic has led to any existing structures and routines being abandoned.  

Rosa von Krogh is Head of Insights and Innovation at the North Alliance, one of the largest companies in Scandinavia marrying design, media and e-commerce. She is speaking at the global SHE Conference, alongside guests like Hillary Clinton, Norwegian PM, Erna Solberg and Icelandic PM Katrin Jakobsdottir, from 5-19th March 2021.

To mark International Women's Day, University of Bristol-led tech incubator, SETsquared Bristol, are opening applications for Enterprising Women 2.0, a pre-incubation programme for women-led businesses, in partnership with NatWest.

UK businesses are at risk of losing employee trust through choosing to abstain from reporting their gender gap figures, following on from the EHRC’s second deadline extension. Government figures show that nearly half of 10,000 eligible employers chose not to submit their pay gap figures last year - equalling to nearly 5,000 businesses that possibly have something to hide.

Despite the global growth of women-led businesses, funding continues to be a significant challenge. Having gathered multiple data and research, Instant Offices revealed 35% of female business founders still face gender bias when raising their business capital. Female entrepreneurs also receive an average of 5% less funding than their male counterparts.

A few years ago I was sitting in a meeting, working while I waited for it to be my turn to present. The engineer sitting next to me asked me what I was doing - I said that in order to make it home in time before my children’s bath time, I had to work through every single free moment. He replied saying he preferred to not get home until after bath time.

Especially for International Women’s Day on March 8, iStock has unveiled a series of tips to help SMBs meaningfully depict diversity, encouraging them to intentionally and authentically portray women across age, race and cultural lines in their marketing and advertising campaigns for their benefit, and the benefit of women everywhere.   

Nearly half of women working in cybersecurity (49%) say that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their career in a positive way, with just nine percent of female cybersecurity professionals saying that the pandemic negatively impacted their career. This is according to a new global report from human layer security company Tessian, published this International Women’s Day.

To coincide with International Women’s Day, O2 is sharing new research revealing how women have been impacted by challenges raised by Coronavirus. As insights show how employees are feeling a year on from the outbreak of the pandemic, O2 is calling on employers to ramp up their focus on wellbeing and take action to ensure women thrive in the post-pandemic workplace.

Almost one fifth of women (17%) are considering starting their own business, in a sign of a potential fresh wave of female-led startups that could help power the UK’s economic recovery.

This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is #ChoosetoChallenge, so we’ve spoken to a host of female leaders doing just that. CEO of Clearbanc, Michele Romanow is using AI to challenge traditional VC investment. With decisions based on data and not ‘who you know’ Clearbanc has invested in 8x more women than men in the UK. CMO of Fiverr Gali Arnon, believes freelance marketplaces are helping to diminish the gender pay gap for women across the world and Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls is on a mission to get more women into coding. 

Research by the Belvoir Group has found that although three quarters of women working in the property industry are keen to run their own business, lack of confidence and concerns about juggling family and work life are major preventative factors.

Gender roles have been set back significantly since the COVID crisis began stated 57% of respondents to a new survey of the UK tech industry released ahead for International Women's Day 2021.

Working at Startups Magazine, we come across some extremely inspiring, empowering and all-round incredible women, but it would be impossible to name them all. As we celebrate International Women's Day 2021, we wanted to highlight our 20 most influential women of 2020 from our last Women in Tech edition.