Signatories to the Investing in Women Code put 32% of their venture capital investment into teams with at least one female founder last year. Across the wider UK market, teams with a female founder drew 15% of total equity investment.
The Code has changed behaviour inside the institutions that signed it. The market those institutions operate in has moved very little. Six years of annual reporting now separates those two claims cleanly enough to see which part of the problem has yielded and which has not.
What is the Investing in Women Code?
The Code is a voluntary commitment for banks, venture capital firms, angel syndicates and other finance providers to improve female entrepreneurs’ access to funding and to report every year on what they have actually done. It came out of the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, the 2019 study Dame Alison Rose led at the UK Government’s request, which put a figure of £250 billion on what would be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the rate men do.
Twelve organisations signed in the Code’s first year. There are now more than 330, with Nationwide and Innovate UK joining in 2026. By 2023 the signatory list already accounted for more than £1 trillion in assets under management, which is the scale that makes an annual reporting duty worth imposing.
Rose has been careful not to overclaim for the mechanism. “The Code was able to highlight where funding and support was available,” she told the Financial Alliance for Women, whose board she has chaired since 2024.
Signposting, in other words, plus the obligation to publish a number.
Has the Investing in Women Code actually changed how venture capital gets allocated?
For the institutions inside it, yes, and the 2026 annual report is the clearest evidence to date.
A third of signatory deals last year included at least one female founder, against a quarter of deals across the wider market. Signatory investment reaching teams with at least one female founder climbed from 27% of their total in 2024 to 32% in 2025. All-female founding teams took 6% of signatory investment value, up from 4% in 2023.
The equivalent wider-market figure was 2%.
Six consecutive years of that pattern are now on the record, which is long enough that you can’t put it down to a good vintage or a couple of outsized deals.
Why has the wider market barely moved?
Because the Code binds only the people who sign it.
Venture capital reaching all-female founding teams stood at under 2% when the Rose Review was published. It was still 2% in 2024. By 2025 it had fallen to 1.3%, and the prize Barclays now puts at £310 billion, restating the Rose Review’s original £250 billion for inflation, is no closer to being claimed.
Set that against what has happened on the supply side, where women in the UK established more than 150,000 new companies in 2022, twice the 2018 figure, and all-female-led companies rose from 16% of UK businesses to 20% across the same four years. Women are starting firms in far greater numbers.
The capital hasn’t tracked them.
That split is the honest summary of where the Rose Review’s agenda stands, and it isn’t a comfortable one. The formation problem has largely responded to advice, networks and visibility. The funding problem has responded only where an institution took on a reporting duty.
What does the data say about who makes the funding decision?
Investment committees with a female majority put 11% of their deals into all-female founding teams. Male-majority committees put in 8%.
Where the broader investment team was majority female, 13% of investment committee decisions involved all-female founding teams, against 7% where it was majority male, according to the British Business Bank. The finding has had almost no attention since the report landed in July.
Same market, same deal flow, different rooms.
It’s a narrower explanation than investor bias in the abstract, and a more useful one, because committee composition is something a firm can change this quarter without waiting for the pipeline to fill.
What is being done about the funding gap now?
Public capital has started moving on terms that carry conditions. The Invest in Women Taskforce deployed over £70 million of its £635 million pool in its first year. The British Business Bank’s Investor Pathways programme commits £400 million with a target of half going to female investors, and its first Microfunds cohort committed up to £90 million to 10 new fund managers, more than half of whose general partners are women.
The reporting side is about to get sharper. A signatory data dashboard is due in 2027, which will show how individual institutions performed instead of a sector aggregate.
Dame Alison has consistently made the commercial case for this rather than the moral one. “This is an enormous commercial and business opportunity,” she has said of the female entrepreneur market, and she has put helping to fund and scale women-led businesses to bank chief executives as a viable line of business alongside a long-term investment in the economy.
Six years of comparative data is the nearest thing to a test of that claim the UK has run, and the signatories come out of it ahead of the market average.
The 2027 dashboard is where the arrangement gets less comfortable. Naming individual institutions puts a cost on treating the annual return as a filing exercise. That’s the point at which a voluntary code stops being free to join.
Tags: trends
