The Scottish Government is set to consider proposals to support more women entering into entrepreneurship following the publication of a wide-ranging independent review.

Pathways: A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship was commissioned by the Scottish Government to identify ways to unlock untapped potential, close the gender gap and boost Scotland’s economy.

The review – led by Ana Stewart, an entrepreneur and investor, and co-authored with Mark Logan, chief entrepreneur to the Scottish Government – makes 31 recommendations.

“This review has, through a combination of extensive stakeholder engagement and robust data analysis, revealed that women face many significant barriers to entrepreneurship,” Stewart said.

Based on their research, the review exposed five major proximate causes of under-participation of women in entrepreneurship:

1. Relative to men, women are often more logistically constrained, making participation in entrepreneurship difficult. Primary care roles are traditionally assigned to women to exploit their free labour and to rationalise longer hours for working men with families. This constraint of expected free labour is a major barrier to enter the demanding entrepreneurial career-path.
2. Women frequently have a sense of “not belonging” in entrepreneurship, which affects their confidence and self-belief. The report notes a general lack of women in entrepreneurship is to mainly blame for this problem, without any mention of why women and other marginalised genders would feel unwelcome in male-dominated spaces.
3. Formally-defined pathways into entrepreneurship are unclear, while informal pathways and networks underserve women. Informal networks which generally enable entrepreneurship are heavily oriented towards men because traditionally, men were the only ones allowed access precisely to keep women dependent on men for monetary stability.
4. General education and the normalisation of entrepreneurship as a valid career path is largely not present in the education system. While this reason affects all demographics, its impact will be greater for marginalised groups such as women and minorities.
5. Women receive far less investment than men at all stages of the entrepreneurial journey from the investment community. According to the report, women-led firms receive less than 2p for ever £1 of total external investment. In Scotland, only 12% of companies that received external investment in 2022 were female-led. University spinouts far no better 0 only 12% that secured funding include female founders, with only 4% having all female founders, contrasting the 75% with all male founders.

“Only one in five businesses in Scotland are female-led, while start-ups founded by women received only 2% of overall investment capital in the last five years,” Stewart said.

“By taking a root cause and effect approach, our recommendations focus on dramatically increasing female participation rates to drive a vibrant and fairer entrepreneurial economy.”

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To solve these major issues and remove the traditional barriers keeping women from entering entrepreneurship, the report provided 31 recommendations which can be summed up in different categories:

• providing start up training and support in a range of pop-up locations to help more women and other primary care givers access to services
• integrating entrepreneurial education into schools and further education
• clarifying existing access pathways into entrepreneurship
• improving access to start-up and growth finance
• tracking and measuring progress towards full representation in entrepreneurship

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon commented on the report: “The review’s findings are challenging but underline the need to tackle the root-causes, as well as the immediate barriers, of this inequality.

“Fully realising the entrepreneurial potential of women in Scotland will not only promote greater equality in our society, it will also deliver significant benefits for the economy.

“The Scottish Government will respond quickly to the review as a whole, and its recommendations.”

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