Not enough women are being shown the money - Nick Freer

On a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Edinburgh this week, an invitation from SIS Ventures to the Dominion cinema in Morningside for the showing of award-winning film “Show Her The Money” was a nice interlude during the working week.

In partnership with Pathways Forward, SIS Ventures hosted the film’s producer Catherine Gray as part of a 100-city global tour. Essentially, the main theme of an excellent and insightful movie is around how women entrepreneurs aren’t getting their share of venture capital.

While star power is provided by American “Cagney & Lacey” actress Sharon Gless, herself a pioneer in the television industry, the real stars of the show are the pioneering entrepreneurs and investors featured in the film.

There is an acute need to increase women’s participation in venture capital

Dawn Lafreeda, who owns more restaurants in the US than any other woman and also invests in early stage ventures, is an absolute powerhouse. Possibly even more impressive is Pocket Sun, who co-founded a female-led VC fund, SoGal Ventures, which has already helped power a number of billion dollar startups, so-called unicorns, in less than a decade.

Since Ana Stewart published the Scottish Government-commissioned Women in Entrepreneurship review, co-authored by Mark Logan, last year the whole subject of gender imbalance in business has come increasingly under the microscope. Some of the stats around the gap between male and female founders are alarming, including that women-founded startups received a paltry 2 per cent of venture capital funding in Europe and the United States in 2023.

Entrepreneurs showcased in the film include Diipa Bulle-Khosla, founder of Inde Wild, a startup that develops skincare products targeted at South Asian women, Dapper Boi’s Vicky Pasche, on a mission to grow the gender-neutral segment of the fashion industry; Marian Leitner of canned wine producer Archer Roose; and Jasmine Jones, founder of online post-mastectomy clothes line Myya.

After the screening of the film, my esteemed colleague Ness Collingridge chaired a panel alongside the LA-based producer Gray, Scottish EDGE CEO Evelyn McDonald and Pathways Forward founder Ana Stewart, a partner with impact investment firm Eos and a successful entrepreneur in her own right.

Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate PR agency the Freer Consultancy (Picture: Stewart Attwood)

My takeaways are that there is an acute need to increase women’s participation in venture capital, improve financial literacy from an early age, and more collective action is needed to support and invest in diverse, underrepresented groups. As expressed by one of the panelists on the day, the further away you are from white middle-aged males, the bigger the barriers are to entrepreneurship.

I guess that is one of the nuances here, in that we can become overly focused on gender imbalance, which can be to the detriment of other marginalised demographics.

A report released this week by Dechomai, a social enterprise on a mission to empower ethnic minority individuals, unveils some of the barriers preventing ethnic minority entrepreneurs from accessing investment.

The report’s findings don’t make easy reading, with the vast majority of investment firms not having targets around engaging and investing in the space. Dechomai’s CEO and founder Bayile Adeoti says, “There isn’t a silver bullet, this requires a system-wide approach, and unless everyone in the ecosystem is involved, it will only be seen as an ethnic minority issue.”