Guest blog by Katy Bruce, Chief Financial Officer, UCLB
Wednesday 8 March is International Women’s Day.
As the Chief Financial Officer for UCLB, the commercialisation company for UCL, I want to use this blog to consider how women are playing a key role in our sector, and how they are being empowered by it.
Importantly, though, this day also acknowledges how much work remains to ensure that women are properly represented in our field. To do that, I want to look at how women are represented in the fields we work with, and in our own organisations.
According to UNESCO, as of 2019, less than 30% of the world’s researchers are women. That proportion falls lower still in disciplines closely associated with STEM, like physics, where just 15% of publication authors are female. Progress to address this has been incremental, rather than transformative, which means a very large part of the world’s population is not engaging in careers exploring the fundamental challenges we all share, like health and climate change, and developing a better understanding of our world.
As professionals working in commercialisation, tech transfer and knowledge exchange, we often emphasise the critical importance of people in ecosystems. We collectively devote time, effort and resource to better encouraging, incentivising and supporting outstanding researchers to share their expertise and knowledge, and to turn their discoveries into real world products, services and impacts.
Particularly in the world of high-growth innovation, an emphasis is placed on facilitating the ‘watercooler’ moments, connecting people with ambition, ideas and skills to unlock solutions, collaboration and progress. From our respective institutions, we will all have our personal case studies of how the ecosystems we foster have helped to connect brilliant people, and those connections to accelerate progress toward a great idea.
But, how can we do this to the best of our ability, if we’re not helping to fulfil the full potential held by women, who are just over half of the potential talent pool?
As with the challenging statistics regarding the participation of women in research, the fields of entrepreneurship, high growth business and venture capital face similar challenges.
In 2021, the Financial Times ran a fascinating analysis which found that from 2010 to 2020, companies led by female entrepreneurs achieved less than 2% of the UK’s venture capital funding, while Sifted highlighted that only 19% of the UK’s angel investors, - who play an important role in taking early stakes - are female. The analysis found that start-ups, which will include spinouts, with all male leadership teams achieved 90% of the available capital. Sifted also noted that the venture capital and entrepreneurship communities can often take a reluctant approach when it comes to issues that particularly impact the experiences of women, like maternity leave. This can include prejudice around the level of time and effort women can commit to growing and scaling a new company.
As knowledge exchange and commercialisation professionals looking to bring both communities together to accelerate the biggest possible ideas, this is a real challenge. We risk solving one part of the equation, only to find another systemic barrier.
So, what are the opportunities to solve these challenges?
Firstly, in the field of knowledge exchange, commercialisation and tech transfer, we can better ensure our own organisations represent diverse perspectives and promote excellent female talent. It’s important that when we’re working across our institutions, we reflect the communities we want to work with, support and advise.
We’re proud at UCLB to be led by Dr Anne Lane, while I was pleased to recently join UCLB’s Senior Leadership Team as its Chief Financial Officer, and our talented team of Business Managers – who advise the outstanding researchers and spinouts in our portfolio - and other key services, like legal and project management, are making strong progress towards better gender representation. We have also sought to ensure we engage great women in our board, like Nessa Carey, a renowned biologist with significant commercialisation and knowledge exchange expertise and Charu Gorasia, UCL’s Chief Financial Officer.
We should also highlight positive steps being taken to improve access for women to careers in science, and the support and acceleration of the UK’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
In Summer 2022, HSBC launched a $1bn fund that is specifically targeting support for women-led businesses. It acknowledges from the outset that female entrepreneurs can be held back by unequal access to networks, mentorship and support, and bias from investors, and it seeks to tackle those issues head-on.
Across the UK, organisations like the WISE Campaign and Women in STEM are taking clear, conscious action to improve the number of women who begin and maintain their careers in research and innovation.
The potential is enormous. To leave you with an aspiration, a 2019 report by Boston Consulting Group highlighted that the world’s economy could be $5tn bigger with equal participation in entrepreneurship across both women and men. Working to commercialise some of the biggest ideas possible, we know that along the way, newly emboldened female entrepreneurs could also tackle some of the biggest societal challenges we face.
This International Women’s Day, we are reminded of the importance of continual progress to ensure everyone has the potential to deliver great knowledge exchange, tech transfer and commercialisation.