The Northern Women Angel Investment Forum is set to be held on Wednesday in Manchester to drive more investment in women and neutralise investment disparities with men.
Figures show that 63% of venture capital firms in the UK do not have any women in senior investment positions.
Equally, at the start of October, it was revealed that female entrepreneurs in the UK experience the highest levels of gender bias across the globe.
Hosted by the UK Business Angels Association, the Northern Women Angel Investment Forum aims to connect entrepreneurs and investors.
The forum offers women an important opportunity to unite and address the current landscape for women investors, learn about the latest developments and examine how to encourage women to get involved in investing in UK start-ups.
“Companies with female founders were only five per cent of total venture capital deals in 2018 and only two per cent of total investment value,” Jenny Tooth OBE, CEO of the UK Business Angels Association, said in a statement.
“With such media coverage regarding women in business and tech, statistics highlight the gargantuan challenge for female-founded businesses to access sufficient investment to scale up,” the CEO of the UK Business Angels Association continued.
“Furthermore, female founders are more likely to get funded at seed stage with 24% of all seed stage deals being in companies with at least one female founder. This reveals the challenge that women founders have in accessing growth stage capital. The magnitude of the task to get women their fair proportion of equity is vast.”
“Events like our Northern Women Angel Investment Forum are pivotal for inspiring women to invest in each other, and start to level the playing field. Statistics have shown a worrying decline overall in the level of equity investments overall in female founders in 2018. We take pride in the fact that angel investments in women founders represent 22% of seed stage deals, highlighting that angel investors are a significant source of investment for companies with at least one female founder.”
Last year, the UK government said it would launch a review into the barriers female entrepreneurs face and assess the obstacles impeding women from starting a business.
