When Dame Alison Rose published the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship in 2019, it carried a number that policymakers found difficult to ignore. Closing the gender gap in UK entrepreneurship would add £250 billion to the economy. Six years later, that figure has been restated by Barclays at £310 billion once adjusted for inflation. The infrastructure built to address it, including the Investing in Women Code that grew out of the Review, is now five years old. The progress is real. The gap has not closed.
The Code was launched in 2019 with 12 founding signatories, established in partnership between HM Treasury and the financial institutions willing to make explicit, public commitments to backing female founders. It was the principal mechanism that emerged from the Rose Review, authored by Dame Alison Rose, then group chief executive of NatWest. The thesis was straightforward. Voluntary commitments from the institutions that allocate capital, paired with transparent annual reporting, would shift behaviour faster than legislation could. The focus of the report was on a clear diagnosis of why this gap and what practical actions could be driven to drive change with real examples globally where change and better performance could be achieved
What the Code has actually done
The 2025 annual report, the most recent, gives the clearest picture so far of whether Dame Alison Rose’s original thesis has held. The number of signatories has risen from 12 to 290, including most of the major UK retail and investment banks, the largest angel networks and a growing share of community development finance institutions. More importantly, the signatories’ behaviour now diverges measurably from the wider market.
The total value of equity deals made by Code signatories to all-female founding teams runs at more than twice the rate of the wider market. For the first time, 52% of investments made by angel signatory groups went to all-female or mixed-gender founding teams. The share of women in IWC angel networks has risen from 15% in 2022 to 25% in 2025. Community Development Finance Institutions, a smaller but consequential channel for early-stage founders, directed 38% of business loans to women-led businesses in 2024.
Across the major channels of early-stage capital, signatories now allocate to female founders at rates that would, in most policy contexts, signal a problem moving toward resolution.
Why does the gap persist when the Code is working?
It is here that the most uncomfortable finding of the past five years sits. The signatories of the Code are outperforming the wider market, and the wider market is moving in the wrong direction. Venture capital allocated to all-female founding teams stood at just under 2% when the Rose Review was published in 2019. It was still 2% in 2024. By 2025, it had fallen to 1.3%.
That fall coincides with a period in which UK women have founded more new businesses than at any point in the data. More than 150,000 companies were registered by women in 2022, more than double the figure from 2018. Among women aged 16 to 25, the increase is sharper still: nearly 17,500 new businesses, a 22-fold rise on 2018. Supply has surged. The capital has not followed.
The Rise Report, the largest grassroots survey of UK female founders published in 2025, captured what is happening at ground level. Of the 2,225 founders surveyed, 45% identified access to funding as their primary obstacle. One in ten cited specific patterns of negative investor behaviour, including dismissive treatment, ghosting and what the report categorises as power imbalances during fundraising. A 2025 Women and Equalities Committee report came to a similar conclusion, finding that female entrepreneurs remain significantly under-resourced. Dame Alison Rose has continued to engage with the ecosystem the Review identified, including through her advisory role at WE Innovate, Imperial College’s national network supporting women founders, which expanded directly from the Review’s recommendations.
A second policy lever, six years late
At the launch of the 2025 Investing in Women Code report, the UK Government announced £500 million in new investment aimed at underrepresented entrepreneurs, alongside an earlier government statement in March 2025 that raising female employment by 5% would add £125 billion to the economy annually. These are substantial moves, and they signal a shift in framing. The Rose Review made the case that closing the gap was an economic opportunity. The current policy posture treats it as a question of national productivity.
Whether £500 million is sufficient is a separate question. The Rise Report’s findings on persistent investor behaviour suggest the constraint is not solely a capital allocation problem. The Code can move signatories’ investment patterns. It is less clear that voluntary frameworks can address how a meeting in a room goes, or how a deal note gets written.
What the next five years need to settle
The Investing in Women Code has done something significant. It has demonstrated that institutions which sign up to a transparent commitment do behave differently, year after year, in ways measurable against the wider market. It has held its signatories accountable in public for five consecutive annual reports. It has anchored a policy infrastructure around a question that, before 2019, had no agreed metric of success. It has also signalled where entrepreneurs with investable cases can go to seek financing – a clear problem identified in the Rose Review.
What it has not done, on its own, is alter the trajectory of venture capital flows to female founders at the wider market level. That reflects the limit of what voluntary instruments can do, rather than a failure of the Code itself. The signatories are not the whole market. The Code’s effect is concentrated where its commitments apply.
The £310 billion figure that Barclays restated in 2026 is the economic prize. The Rose Review identified it. The Investing in Women Code, Dame Alison Rose’s principal policy legacy, has been the principal mechanism for chasing it. The data now suggests that the next phase of work needs to widen beyond signatory institutions, and to confront the parts of the funding ecosystem the Code’s authority does not reach. A productivity gap of this size will not be closed by 290 institutions outperforming a market that is moving the other way.