Britain’s Invisible Businesses: the under-marketing of female-led businesses

Why an economy worth £250bn a year still struggles to be seen

Roughly one in five UK businesses with employees is led by a woman. Between them, these businesses employ 2.7 million people and contribute more than £250 billion to the UK economy every year — a sum comparable to the entire economic output of a country like Portugal (Funding Circle, 2024). And yet ask most people to name five female-led British businesses beyond a handful of well-worn examples, and the list runs dry fast. That gap — between economic weight and public visibility — is the story.

This isn’t a grievance piece. It’s an observation about how value gets seen, or doesn’t, in the UK economy. Businesses generating a quarter of a trillion pounds a year are, by any reasonable definition, structurally significant. They are also, by measurable standards, under-covered by the press and under-marketed by the people who built them. Both things can be true, and understanding why is more useful than arguing about whether they should be.

The scale is not in question

The headline number — one in five — comes from ONS-derived business population data and has barely moved since 2018, when it stood at 16% (Prowess, 2025; Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship). That review, commissioned by the Treasury and led by NatWest’s then-CEO, put a number on the opportunity cost of the gap: up to £250 billion in new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men. In other words, the £250 billion female-led businesses currently generate is roughly matched by the £250 billion still left on the table.

This is not a niche segment of the economy. Women-led SME employer firms alone account for 2.7 million jobs (Funding Circle, 2024). Self-employment among women has grown 8% over the past decade, even as self-employment among men fell by around 12% over the same period (money.co.uk, 2025). Company formation by women more than doubled between 2018 and 2022. By any conventional measure of economic contribution, this is a growth story.

Anne Boden is the case that proves the point and complicates it at the same time. She founded Starling Bank in 2014 and built it into one of the UK’s most successful digital/challenger banks — a business now worth billions and profitable years ahead of most fintech peers. For a stretch, Starling was the go-to example of what a female-led business could become. But Boden stepped down as CEO in 2023, and the bank’s current chief executive, appointed in 2024, is Raman Bhatia. The founder was highly visible; once the business reached scale, the leadership profile reverted to a familiar pattern. That’s not a criticism of Starling’s board — it’s a useful illustration of how thin the pipeline is even at the success stories.

Tech tells the same story, louder

If female-led businesses are under-covered generally, technology is where the gap turns into a canyon. Women hold just 9.4% of CEO roles at FTSE 100 companies, a figure that falls to 6.1% in the FTSE 250 (FTSE Women Leaders Review, 2025). Board representation has genuinely improved — the UK now ranks second among G7 nations, with women holding 43% of board seats — but that progress has not reached the executive layer, let alone the CEO’s chair. The number of female FTSE CEOs actually fell, from 20 in 2023 to 19 in 2024.

In tech specifically, the numbers are starker still. Women hold only 21% of senior technology roles in the UK, and just 11% of executive positions within the tech industry (Spacelift, 2026). This matters beyond optics: technology is where much of the UK’s highest-growth, highest-valuation business activity is concentrated, and it’s also the sector setting the template for how “founder” and “leader” get pictured in the press. When the visible leadership of the fastest-growing part of the economy skews this heavily male led sector, it reinforces the same default that keeps female-led businesses out of headlines elsewhere — editors and investors reach for the names and faces they’ve already seen, and the tech sector keeps handing them the same profile.

The coverage doesn’t match the contribution

Here’s where “hidden in plain sight” earns its name. Research from King’s College London found that women accounted for only 9% of mentions of notable business people in the UK financial press, and that on high-profile beats like the economy, men’s share of voice was up to 31 times higher than women’s (King’s College London). More broadly, women were the quoted voice in only 29% of UK news stories analysed in 2019. This isn’t a reflection of business quality or newsworthiness — it’s a reflection of who gets asked, who gets quoted, and who ends up as the default case study when a journalist needs a business leader to comment.

The consequence compounds. Media visibility feeds investor attention, and investor attention has its own well-documented gap. In 2024, just 2% of UK equity investment went to all-female founding teams, down from 2.5% the year before, while all-male teams took over 80% of the venture capital allocated (The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship, 2025). Female-founded businesses raised an average of £1.05 million in funding in 2024, against £6.2 million for solely male-owned businesses. Press invisibility and capital scarcity aren’t separate problems — they reinforce each other.

Another observation: I’m a massive fan of Stephen Bartlett and an avid listener of his podcast, but after listening to several back-to-back I realised I hadn’t heard too many female voices. This the incredibly successful entrepreneur, celebrity and founder of the Diary of a CEO podcast has only interviewed 23% of women on his podcast (source: analysis using AI tool Claude, excluding panel interviews so I may be doing him an injustice!).

The under-marketing is partly self-inflicted — and that’s worth naming plainly

The press gap explains only half the story. The other half sits closer to home: a substantial body of research, including studies out of Wharton and Harvard, finds that women systematically under-promote their own work relative to men — not because they doubt their ability, but despite knowing their performance is equal (NBER Digest; Wharton). Seventy-six percent of women in leadership positions cite inadequate self-promotion as a major obstacle to their professional success. Some of this is a rational response to a real cost: research reviewing 71 studies on gender and workplace dynamics found that assertive self-advocacy carries a professional backlash risk for women that men simply don’t face to the same degree. Underselling isn’t irrational when overselling has historically been penalised more harshly.

Put the pieces together and the pattern is coherent rather than mysterious. A press ecosystem that defaults to male voices on business and tech topics, a leadership pipeline that thins out precisely at the point of scale, and a rational reluctance among many founders to push hard against that current — together they produce exactly what we see: enormous economic output with a thin public profile. Neither cause requires bad intent from any individual editor, investor, or founder. It’s a structural feedback loop, and structural problems respond to structural fixes.

What “visible” would actually require

None of this calls for special pleading. It calls for accurate accounting. If a fifth of UK businesses generate a quarter of a trillion pounds and employ 2.7 million people, that’s not a rounding error in the national economic story — it’s a headline in its own right, and it should appear as one in commissioning meetings, panel line-ups, and case study selections as a matter of routine, not exception.

For the businesses themselves, the practical takeaway is more direct: visibility is not vanity. Press coverage, case studies, and public commentary function as free distribution and de facto credit checks for investors who move faster when they’ve already heard your name. Businesses generating this much economic value have earned a seat in that conversation. The data says they’re already doing the work. The question is whether the rest of the economy — media, capital markets, and tech leadership pipelines alike — catches up to what the numbers have been saying for years.