Women entrepreneurs

Tomorrow I'm meeting Jenny Fielding, who has recently arrived in London from the US. She works for a really interesting organisation called Astia whose mission it is to bring promising women entrepreneurs into supported contact with venture funds. As someone who has been meeting and writing about entrepreneurs for a good part of my career, I was curious to drill some numbers here. According to VentureOne (a Dow Jones subsidiary) in 2007, companies run by women CEOs attracted just 2.9% of available funding in the US, down from 4.52% in 2006. The UK tally is undoubtedly even worse, although perhaps tellingly, I haven't found a reliable data source. The reason is almost certainly one of closed male networks. Venture funds tend to back people they know. Ninety-four per cent of venture fund management in the US is male. In Britain, who knows? More, probably. Ergo male entrepreneurs are 20 times as likely to get funded as their female counterparts.

Astia has an astonishing track-record of getting bright women entrepreneurs early stage funding in Silicon Valley. Running a pilot last year in New York, 70 per cent of companies who had been accepted into the Astia programme, got funded. Jenny Fielding is here to replicate the model in London and it will be fascinating to see how it works. There are, of course, some great examples of young women entrepreneurs – Christina Domecq (SpinVox), Sarah McVittie (Textperts), Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Susie Willis (Plum-Baby), Cary Marsh (Mydeo) – but they (or rather we) are not winning this game en masse. Spectacularly failing at it, actually.