Wit, grit and a whole heap of bullsh1t

There is a particular type of exhaustion that comes from being told the system is improving while watching, year after year, as the numbers barely move.

The share of total equity investment by value for all-female founder teams has remained stagnant over the last decade, only receiving 2% of funding. Yet 13% could be added to the UK market if we invested in viable female and ethnic minority-led businesses, according to the British Business Bank. A 2026 report from Female Founders Rise, a community of over 11,000 female entrepreneurs, also highlighted how 3 in 4 report negative sentiment towards UK public funding, such as grants, describing processes as bureaucratic and time-consuming. Meanwhile, the contradiction is research from McKinsey & Company consistently finds that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are more likely to outperform financially. 

The entrepreneurial ecosystem was not designed with women in mind. It evolved around networks, capital flows and risk assumptions that favour uninterrupted careers, homogenous circles and the ability to fail loudly. And often without long-term reputational consequence. Women entrepreneurs operate without those buffers. We are granted less capital, less margin for error and fewer informal routes into influence. Therefore, progress is frequently promised but transformation is much slower. 

So something has happened instead. Women have stopped waiting and built anyway.

We have launched companies while navigating maternity leave policies that lag behind rhetoric. We have pitched investors between childcare logistics. We have scaled products in markets that routinely underestimate their customers. We've done so without the financial cushioning or institutional goodwill often afforded to our male counterparts.

This certainly isn't a story about grievance as an identity but instead one about using pressure as a catalyst. When you build without structural tailwinds, you develop a different operating discipline. Women think long-term because we cannot afford short-term theatrics, we have to manage risk carefully because capital is finite and we prioritise customers because we certainly don't have the luxury of vanity metrics. In other words, we build through pressure. Nowhere is that pressure more visible than in the technology sector.

For decades, technology has been designed by relatively narrow demographic groups and deployed at scale into the lives of everyone else. Women are often the primary users of digital products, yet rarely the primary architects. Consider Flo Health, the company behind one of the world's most downloaded period-tracking apps. Initially built by men and later valued at over $1 billion, it represents both progress and paradox: a billion-dollar enterprise rooted in women's biological data, conceived in rooms where women were underrepresented. That's why female founders are less likely to copy models that were never built with them in mind. Founders like Amber Vodegel who is building 28X, a free-to-use, privacy-safe menstrual health platform designed to bring essential period and cycle education to women across the world, are proof of how different technology feels when it centres women's lived experience from the start.

Fashion is another great example. A UK online market worth over £60 billion annually, according to Statista, women drive the majority of purchasing decisions yet the infrastructure supporting those decisions remains fragmented, opaque and commercially skewed. Search engines like Google prioritise paid placements and their algorithms learn purchasing patterns but not context. That's incredibly important when selling clothes to women, something deeply personal and often emotional. Especially when you're 48 and those jeans no longer fit. In fact, did they ever? Unsurprising, given fashion sizing hasn't meaningfully modernised since the post-war era. Sob.

In simple terms, when you've had to fight your way through a system, you see its flaws more clearly. You see who benefits and who gets overlooked. That's why female founders are less likely to copy models that were never built with them in mind.

There is also a hard economic case for paying attention. Boardwave recently estimated that up to £310 billion could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men. Closing the funding gap is a material opportunity.

Yet while policy discussions continue and investment committees debate incremental change, female founders are not pausing. We are refining product-market fit, hiring cautiously and firing carefully and negotiating contracts, fixing bugs, chasing invoices and recalibrating forecasts. We are building through what can only be described, inelegantly but accurately, as a whole heap of bullshit.

This 'advantage' we've been given (forced into) has created something strangely special.  The businesses forged under constraint are rarely fragile. Women entrepreneurs are stress-tested early on, disciplined with capital and we understand our customers intimately because we often ARE our customers. Female founders rarely crumble at the first market wobble because we have never operated in ideal conditions.

It is entirely reasonable to be frustrated by the pace of change and it's rational to question why adaptation so often falls to those excluded in the first place. But it is also undeniable that a generation of female founders is raising the bar precisely because they had to.

We are not waiting for the path to be cleared. Instead, we are clearing it by walking it. Wit helps. Grit is non-negotiable. And the bullshit may not disappear any time soon but what is being built in spite of it, and sometimes because of it, is durable. It's disciplined. And increasingly, it's setting the standard.