'Over-mentored and under-capitalised': Female entrepreneurs receive only 1.1% of funding, summit learns
A report from the Diversity Tech Summit 2022
The Diversity Tech Summit 2022 in London this week brought together key individuals from diverse communities to discuss and debate the diversity and inclusion agenda in the context of global challenges such as climate change, securing the next generation of start-ups and extending skills and opportunities across the whole of the UK.
This, the second summit of its type, also celebrated the 10th anniversary of Diversity UK, a charity which aims to advance the education of the public about the importance and value of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
The summit kicked off with a keynote address delivered by Lord Karan Bilimoria CBE, DL who is an embodiment of the diversity for which he advocates. A British Indian businessperson, Bilimoria founded Cobra Beer and, in addition to serving as Chancellor of University of Birmingham, is currently president of the CBI and a politically active crossbench peer. In his keynote, Lord Bilimoria talked of the improvement in the political representation of ethnic minorities in Parliament, although noted that the proportion of ethnic minority MPs and peers is still not representative of the wider population. He also talked of his involvement in the Change the Race Ratio group, which campaigns for greater racial and ethnic diversity and board level by means of target setting and cultures of transparency and inclusion.
Some lively panel discussions followed. In a discussion about how tech can help us to solve global challenges, panellists including Lukky Ahmed, CO-Founder and CEO, Climate X and Lucy Yu, CEO, Centre for Net Zero talked about how, whilst technology can help us to keep global temperatures from rising to more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, it will likely play an even larger part in helping global adaptation to the effects of this warming.
How to increase the diversity of access to capital
Two panels focused on tech entrepreneurship. Investing in Women Founders discussed the pressures and biases that lead to women entrepreneurs raising a barely-there 1.1% share of total VC funding. The panel discussed some of the societal and systemic challenges which result in fewer women entrepreneurs even being in a position to pitch.
Deepali Nangia, Partner at seed investor Speed Invest stated that women are, "over-mentored and under-capitalised." Nangia and Saloni Bhojwani, Co-Founder of Pink Salt Ventures explained that women founders tend to be questioned far more about risk and downside than their male counterparts and this materially affects funding levels. Whilst accelerators like Founders Factory offer coaching in their accelerators programs, both Nangia and Bhojwani were emphatic that it was the system that needed to change rather than women simply being coached to pitch like men. Male investors need to understand that, as Bhojwani asserted, "there's more than one way to explain a business."
A panel chaired by Joyeeta Das, Founder of Cleantech pitch programme SuperPitch and no code analytics platform Gyana, discussed ways that underrepresented founders could be better supported, and suggested some practical advice for founders including avoiding some of the more obvious "fake it until you make it" approaches often advised by those coaching entrepreneurs, but focus instead on the fundamentals of developing a robust business model that can be easily articulated and that founders need to devote as much time and seriousness to raising money as they do every other aspect of the business.
Levelling up opportunities and skills
The Levelling Up Opportunities panel concluded that, whilst storytelling to communicate some of the fantastic tech success stories based in cities such as Manchester and Newcastle, local and national government does still have a huge part to play if significantly more opportunities in areas such as Fintech are to be extended to those who live outside of London and the M4/M3 triangle.
Only local and national government can resolve the infrastructure issues that function as a barrier to businesses being headquartered in cities other than London, and subsequently encourage the flight of skills away from cities and towns in the north, coastal towns and the south-west of England. The panel expressed a degree of frustration at the apparent absence of joined up thinking and policy on the levelling up agenda which remains, to date, more of a slogan than a tangible programme for change.
The final panel of the day was focused on the digital skills shortage, an issue which is already causing economic harm and that continues to hamper productivity and economic growth. Contributors such as Nelson Sivalingam, Co-Founder and CEO of HowNow the learning experience platform, explained that that much time is being wasted identifying the skills that are lacking because we're living in era of exponential change. Sivalingam stated that what he often found missing in businesses was the organisational culture and mindset to approach continuous learning at a speed.
The panel also drew attention to the huge cutbacks in education spending which have and continue to have such a deleterious impact on the ability of young adults to find opportunities and the challenges inherent in quantifying the skills that people have if we're to move away from the emphasis on academic qualifications and begin to use the talents of the majority of individuals who don't go to university.
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