Hello, boys: why investing in women makes sense

Edie G. Lush

Edie G. Lush says women have a strong track record as entrepreneurs and managers, yet struggle to find support from Britain’s male-dominated venture capital community

Judith Clegg runs Glasshouse, a club for entrepreneurs across all sectors that holds monthly events in London, New York, San Francisco – and soon Mumbai and Bangalore. She remembers the day she started at Arthur Anderson in 1993, when it was still a big deal that women in her division were allowed to wear trousers. She says, ‘I don’t think it’s the case that there are a lot of VCs out there saying they don’t want to fund women. Most of the investors I meet just want to fund the best businesses they can find and have absolutely no problem in backing talented women.’

Clegg is no stranger to entrepreneurship herself – she was a founding director of Moonfruit – a website building service – with another woman and two men, raising £8 million from VCs. ‘We benefited from of the some advantages of being female entrepreneurs. For example, we obtained a higher press profile because half of our founding team including the chief executive were women.’

While most venture capitalists would undoubtedly see themselves as modern investors, indifferent to the sex of the executives and teams in which they invest – the stories from the trenches tell a slightly different picture. Alison Kibble is the chief executive of Femeda, a company that makes a medical device for women who suffer from bladder weakness. Despite the fact that one in three women over the age of 18 have this problem and around $12 billion is spent every year on incontinence products, Kibble found it tough getting meetings with investors.

‘Men feel incredibly uncomfortable talking about this subject and even amongst women it is often a secret problem. We sent our materials to many potential VCs and we knew they were immediately put to one side because the men receiving them just didn’t understand the problem or what we were proposing to do about it. A few that we did manage to get meetings with said they couldn’t possibly take us on as an investment as our product was too unsavoury.’