IWD 2021
Startups Magazine’s International Women’s Day 2021 series is a wide-ranging collection of features, profiles, and commentary published to mark the occasion, spanning everything from celebrating the magazine’s 20 most influential women of 2020 to highlighting the persistent inequalities — from the gender pay gap to female representation in tech — that still demand attention. The series takes both a historical and a contemporary lens, with pieces reflecting on inspiring female inventors across every decade since 1910, as well as interviews with founders and entrepreneurs actively reshaping their industries in the present day.
The founder of LatchAid, a FemTech startup using innovative technology to revolutionise breastfeeding and early parenting support, has won the prestigious Women in Innovation award.
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.
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.
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.
