Business leader and female founder-backing investor Helen Oldham believes gender equality isn't about altruism, it's about sound financial strategy
If women don't have the same rights, opportunities and pathways as men, then as a planet we are not harnessing the full potential of the people who live on earth. 50% of the world's population is female, but at the moment, that is where equality ends.
SDG 5 is… GENDER EQUALITY - Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Expert guest Helen Oldham is someone who has blazed a trail of business success in often male-dominated sectors and now works to provide opportunity, investment and support to female founders and women looking to progress in the world of work. In her career Helen Oldham has turned around massive media organisations as a Managing Director. Now she is the co-Founder of Lifted Ventures which backs female entrepreneurs and also a founding trustee of the female employment charity Smart Works.
In this episode, Kate and Helen discuss...
The global context. What is the nature of the challenge to improve the current situation where, if existing rates of progress continue, it will take hundreds of years to get equality in leadership roles? Helen thinks the stats speak for themselves... in a start-up context female founders out-perform male ones... so why don't they get the same access to funding? Releasing the potential of women by giving equal access to funding and opportunity can boost business, innovation and the green sector on a global scale.
A national and regional focus. What particular challenges does the UK face? Helen talks about her work with Smart Works and outlines some of the hurdles women in the UK face getting into work. She also recounts stories from her own career where she has faced obstacles and prejudice. Helen and Kate discuss recent government policy changes around angel investment and Helen has direct feedback to regional investment funds about the levels of female representation on funding panels.
Finally Helen and Kate bring the conversation to a practical focus. What can be done to actually deliver SDG 5 at global, national and regional scales? Plus, how can we help? What one thing can we stop doing, and what one thing can we start doing that will make a real positive difference, right now?
To find about more about Lifted Ventures, go to liftedventures.co.uk
To find out more about Smart Works, visit smartworks.org.uk
Hello and welcome to The17. This is a podcast dedicated to sustainability. It's structured around the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. Together they represent a plan to protect the future of the planet. I'm Kate Hutchinson and I'm the founder of the Yorkshire Sustainability Festival. My goal is to help the UK's regions and businesses to play their part in delivering a sustainable future.
Each episode of this podcast focuses on one individual UNSDG and every time I'll be joined by a different expert whose expertise and knowledge relates to that goal. In this episode we're tackling goal five which is gender equality. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Our guest is someone who has blazed a trail of business success in often male dominated sectors.
And now works to provide opportunity, investment, and support to female founders and women looking to progress in the world of work. In her career, Helen Alden has turned around massive media organizations as a managing director. And now she's the co founder of Lifted ventures, which backs female entrepreneurs.
She's also a founding trustee of the female employment charity Smartworks. Helen, welcome to The Seventeen. Oh, thank you, Kate. And thanks so much for that introduction. So Helen, what does gender equality mean to you? So obviously my space is the early stage investment space. And I think that's pretty critical to the world that we live in because at the moment we know that there's a very unequal playing field when it comes to supporting particularly early stage female founders to get the investment that they need.
I think we are really clear that we need to move away from talking about it. the disparity and talk about the business benefits of why you should back female founders, why you should back women when it comes to investment. And we know that typically women founders will exit their businesses more quickly than their male founder counterparts.
And we also know that they're more likely to exit. earlier as well. So typically women will exit a business at sort of eight or nine years versus the 12 years of a male founder. And we also know that for every pound invested, in a female founder, you'll get twice as much revenue. So there's some really solid reasons why you should back women.
But when it comes to the equality piece, you know, in the background, it's difficult to ignore the fact that only sort of between two and 4 percent of all VC funding goes to female founders in the UK. And that's not just a UK issue. It is a global issue. Unfortunately, the statistics are fairly common across the whole of the world.
And there's some systemic. Issues as to why those statistics exist. But it means that we have to be very intentional about how to change that because the world that's being created for the future by sort of tech founders in particular, they're the people creating the world that, you know, we're going to live in in the future, but particularly our.
children and our grandchildren. And if those are all being built by predominantly male led teams, then, you know, that's not a world that's going to create the sort of equality that we all want to live in or be fit for the world that we all want to live in. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I've often heard you talk about as well when we've been at Smartworks events has been around, you know, when you help a woman, that woman goes on to help her whole community.
She doesn't just help herself. When she's supported, she goes on to help her whole community. Women are so community led that there's a lot of benefit to supporting women and creating an opportunity for an equal playing field. That's all we really want, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, typically women are really good at building sort of high performing Diverse teams as well, because they've been through that sort of hard yards themselves.
Yeah. So I completely agree with you. There's a really strong halo effect, but you know, there is a big chunk of money missing from the UK economy from the fact that we don't have enough women. First of all, entering the workplace, which is what smart works does. So they provide some coaching and. free sort of clothes to women to help them get that job interview and then to land a job.
So first of all, making sure they're economically active, but also in the sort of early stage startup space that, you know, we're providing that opportunity for those businesses to grow. So what challenges have you faced in your life and your career? Okay, that's a big question. So numerous, I mean, I think like a lot of women, My first challenge was in belief in myself.
So when I started my career in newspapers, my dad said to me, What are you doing that for? Like, you are quite a strong introvert, and you're going into a very noisy environment dominated by people. some big characters, you know, are you going to be able to hold your own there and succeed? He said, I think you're making a big mistake.
But I think there's a pattern, I've got a pattern of behavior around people telling me that I can't do something. Yeah, I'm the same on that. Pretty much setting out to prove them wrong. And that started with my dad. Yeah. But a succession of similar conversations through my early stage career in newspapers telling me that I couldn't be a manager, even though I was a sort of manager of quite a big team at 25.
And one of the only females doing that. And then later on, as I moved more into the managing director phase of my career in newspapers, you know, the numbers of women in that. a sphere were quite small, getting your voice heard was, was quite tricky, but I mean I could tell all sorts of stories. I had a boss who told me that I couldn't wear trousers to work, you could, that women should always wear a skirt.
I had a boss that said women couldn't, of advertising representatives for the organization that could only be guys. And so there was a sort of number of firsts in that sort of early stage of my career. But I think what will resonate more with people now is that environment where you may be the lone voice in the room, particularly in board meetings or in senior decision making environments.
And there's quite a bit of research that says, That when there are two women in the room, then you're more likely to be able to land your thinking and your, your feedback and your input. It's much more tricky when you're the only one in the room, either because your ideas are not being heard, or you get talked over.
So you have to be very strategic about thinking, what's the agenda I want to push here? How am I going to land these conversations? well and probably takes quite a lot longer to frame all of that than it might be if you're one of the male counterparts around the room where you know that you've got a safe space to sort of share your thinking.
Even eight years ago when I started one of my first jobs after graduating we were told that the women all had to wear heels in the office. And you're like, this is years ago. It's insane, isn't it? At least my story was considerably longer ago. It's just, yeah, I think it's absolutely, we, we are moving in the right direction for definite, but there's still a hell of a long way to go, isn't there?
Yeah, there is. And I mean, it's good that the number of women in boards rooms is increasing, particularly in the FTSE 300, but it's still only about 20%. Like we can celebrate the progression, but I think we also have to be clear that's still not good enough. Yes. Because those women are the more likely to be giving, creating the right environment for Other women to come through and be the leaders of the future.
Yeah. And to be those role models that are going to give women the encouragement to actually step into the space in the first place. Yeah. Because that can be quite scary. So how does your organization like Lift Adventures and Smartworks, how do they both aim to achieve gender equality here in the UK?
Yeah. So if I start off with Lift Adventures, I think I've already talked about the fact that we really strongly want to Make more visible the fact that building a portfolio with women founders and is actually going to generate you a better result in the long run, whether you're an angel investor or whether you're a VC backing female founders, we know that there's a big job to do to build capacity.
So to build the investment flowing towards female founders and to do that, we need more women to think about venturing into being an angel investor. It's not the same kind of journey that typically a man will go on if they exit a business or if they come out of a big job. Quite often men will naturally think of the next step as being, I want to give something back.
I want to be an angel investor. And I will probably know quite a few guys in my network who've already decided to do that and I'll join them. For women, it's much less visible. Typically, there's a lack of awareness that this is an interesting, exciting, also high risk way to develop out your wealth management.
So we need to make sure that women are aware it's an option and to give them the confidence and education that they need to take those first steps. So inside Lyft Adventures, we actually have a really great team. Great education program where we go through all of the basic steps around how to be an effective angel investor.
So how do you pick good opportunities? How do you decide whether the founding team is capable of scaling the business? How do you read financials? And then how do you actually go through the legal process of being an angel investor? None of it's that complicated. But you know, I think providing that visibility of how simple it can be and also going through a program with other women and all learning together.
And potentially all thinking about investing together as well, because you get that blend of expertise and everybody's background and skills feeding into the due diligence process around deciding whether to make that investment and then actually going through through that process. Yeah, definitely. So I would say.
Those are the things that sort of top of our agenda, but more than anything, we just, we're very clear. We're not a talking shop. Although we may often show up at events and talk about these things, we, we want to get the money flowing. Yeah. That's what's going to make the biggest difference. Yeah, definitely.
The government have just tried to make this significantly harder and then reneged on it because we all kicked off, which I think was the right thing to do. But I think it'd be interesting just to dig into that for a second, because actually in terms of raising the profile of female investors, I think it's actually, we.
There's an opportunity now that the government has ballsed up and then come back on it. You know, I don't, just to give some context to, to the podcast, um, what happened in the October budget, they announced that there was going to, they were going to change the rules for angel investing so that your income had to be over 170 grand in order to be able to invest.
And then when, when female investors looked into this, what they discovered was that only 1 percent of female investors. would still be able to be angel investors after this new rule would come into play. Yeah. That's right, isn't it? It is. It's slightly more nuanced than that. So I'm on the board of the UK Business Angels and we have an executive chair who's an amazing woman called Jenny Tooth.
And she had been lobbying government for some time to say that they shouldn't, they shouldn't or they should be aware that there may be some adverse impact of changing the legislation. It hadn't been changed for five years. So I think, you know, being pragmatic, everybody could understand that potentially the investment threshold level ought to go up in terms of that salary or earnings potential.
Right. I think the other thing to be aware of is that there are three ways that you can be You can self certify as a, as an angel investor, there has always been the option to join an angel network and be a member of an angel network for six months and therefore no wealth or earnings threshold would be required.
Okay. And I think that element of the message got lost a little bit in the noise. That existed before and after the most recent changes, but I think what did happen, and I've got an immense admiration for other women in our sector who really pushed this agenda, is that changing that threshold did adversely impact more on diverse groups, so not just women but also black investment organizations and those who are focused on the more diverse groups or difficult to reach groups.
Yeah. So, I think. The momentum that built up around that was incredible and it was so good to be part of feeling that, you know, we were challenging something and eventually getting that positive outcome for that wealth threshold to come back to a hundred thousand. Yes. But I completely agree with your initial observation.
I think it has really raised the profile of the fact that angel investing is important to the UK economy and particularly the diversity agenda around investment is particularly important. Yeah. But I would just emphasize that point that there is no wealth threshold for being an angel. You can join a network.
That's really good to know. And you can invest. Even if you're earning less than a hundred thousand and for a lot of women may not be economically active at this moment in time for various reasons. They might be on maternity leave. They might've taken a career gap. They can be angels. And it's a myth that you require a huge amount of earnings to start being an active angel investor in our organization.
You can invest as little as 2000 pounds in a deal. And that. can all roll up to a larger amount when a number of people come together in a round. Yeah. I think the other thing that can quite often happen is that when women angel syndicates come together and back a founder, it becomes a catalyst for a bigger round.
Yeah. And that round may then go out to other angel networks who, who join that round. or other VCs. I've seen that happen multiple times. Yeah. So I'm also a big proponent of the fact that whilst we might be investing smaller tickets, the impact can actually be disproportionately large from that initial investment.
Tell me more about your role within Smartworks and how that impacts women. Yeah. So I was immensely privileged to be The sort of founding chair of SmartWorks Leeds. We sort of started off just before COVID and then had an interesting couple of years whilst we sort of transitioned the service to be virtual and in person.
But essentially we're doing two things really, really well. It's a simple, but super effective model. And that is that we are providing. a set of clothes, a free set of work clothes to a woman who has an interview booked with an employer. But more importantly that than that, we're giving the gift of confidence because we then give an hour's worth of coaching to that person, talking them through how they might answer interview questions.
And typically we'll be looking at how to get Uh, help our women clients understand about transferable skills because often our clients may feel that they don't have anything to offer because they've been out of the job market for quite a long time. So being able to explain that quite a few of the things that they may be doing are very valuable in a workplace, I think it's quite often a light bulb moment.
But we have a very diverse group of women coming through the center, which is based at Mapgate Mills in Leeds. So. Over 50 percent of them are single parents, 25 percent of them will have had sort of 50 or more interviews in a year and not still not managed to land a job. You can tell that I'm very much a statistics orientated person, a target orientated person.
So I'm also sort of delighted to share that around 70 percent of the women that we help go on to get the job. Which is like, what a great result. And I think for the client who comes to see us, knowing that we're interested in what happened after the interview, like, we want to know. And we'll put in a phone call and say, how did you get on?
And whether the result was a good one or a bad one, we're there. But. you know, more often than not from those statistics you can tell then we've got someone sharing their relation with the fact that they did manage to get the job. Yeah, absolutely. It is, it's really profound work and it's, it's amazing the difference that the charity makes to, to women.
And I'll give a little plug here for their events as well too, because I was one of the trustees in the, in the early years as well and I used to organise their events and they still go on and they're absolutely amazing. And ladies, if you're ever wondering where you can get an absolutely incredible bargain.
go to the SmartWorks sales, because it's unbelievable the level of bargain that you can get. Um, and all of the money then goes to helping the SmartWorks centers run. So I'll just let you know at the last one, I got a pair of Victoria Beckham trousers for 10. So go, because they're really worth going. So yeah.
It's well worth supporting the charity. It does make a massive difference to women. And I think, you know, just like we talked about at the beginning, one of the things that I really took away from it was that, you know, when you help a woman, that woman goes on to help a whole community. So how do we empower more women?
Because that then the ripple effect of that is so much beyond what helping that one woman. And I think that's really powerful. Yeah, that's so true. Okay, so let's dive in to the UN sustainability goal, gender equality. Here are some facts about the current situation. According to UN statistics, one in five young women are married before their 18th birthday.
At the current rate of progress, it will take 140 years to achieve equal representation and leadership roles in the workplace and 286 years to close all of the gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws. Nearly half of married women lack decision making power over their sexual and reproductive health and rights.
So, the situation is pretty stark. Helen, out of all of these stats, what hits you the hardest and why? So, Kate, first of all, all of those are really grim, aren't they? I mean, it's a stark reality. I'm a big believer that when you share statistics like that where it can feel a little bit overwhelming that you concentrate on the things that you can change and that you can influence.
So the one I'm most interested in is the 140 years to get to equality in women's leadership positions because I think there are some clear things that we can do. to go faster in that environment. And one of the strongest ones is actually male allyship. Yes. So in the lifted ventures model, we have male angel investors.
They're a very important part of our community. And actually we know that by having male allies, it kind of the statistics say that that can double our impact because we've got those strong voices in sort of more pure male communities where we know currently the sort of power and influence lies. So I think I would concentrate mostly on that one and think about how we can move forward.
in a more positive way in some of those environments. Yeah, definitely. I agree with you. I'm all about looking for words, the opportunity that we can take things forward as well. So SDG 5 talks all about empowering women and girls. Where do you think the biggest issues are? Are they in the workplace or are they outside of the workplace in society as a whole?
So clearly they are in society as a whole because the workplace is just a microcosm of society, isn't it? Yeah. But I think sort of having role models, you know, the, influence that you can have when you're visible. And when you're actively encouraging the whole community to come with you, I think is, is really powerful.
And I think one thing I'm seeing every day is not just women, but everybody keen to give time back, you know, in terms of mentorship, in terms of support, particularly for, for female founders and helping them grow their businesses. And, you know, I think that's the way that we're influence the greatest change.
I'm a massive believer in the power of community and collaboration, like no one organization is going to be able to change some of these metrics by themselves. But when we work together, we can be immensely powerful in having a louder voice, but also giving some clear touch points and engagement points to give people that incentive to know what to do, you know, where can they put their attention to actually help change some of these dynamics.
So in terms of the UK, give us a sense of some of the toughest challenges that we're facing in terms of gender equality and how you think we can go about solving them. Yeah, so I sort of mentioned at the beginning that there's still this statistic about the fact that the money going to female founders has not really changed in quite some time.
Certainly in the last five years, it's been smashing it on a return on investment. Yeah. Even in the last two to four years, it's not changed much, even though we know that the numbers of women starting businesses is actually growing considerably. So there's been a big uptake in the number of women launching businesses since 2018 to now is almost doubled.
I think partly that's the pandemic effect of people wanting women in particular wanting to be more in control of their own destiny and having more flexible working. I've talked about the gender funding gap. However, when you look at the statistics for 2023 actually the UK topped the amount of money for money flowing to female founders.
There was 4 billion flow to female founders across 720 deals and that was the highest amount in the whole of Europe. But I would say whilst we should celebrate that as being a good indication that I think the UK is getting really focused around these issues, and there are a number of different interventions happening, there's still a lot to do.
There's certainly been a big large number of sort of female focused, female entrepreneur groups launching and also sort of female led angel investor groups starting in the last 12 months. And I think that's super encouraging. And I'd go back to the point I made earlier that, you know, we can do more together when we all work collaboratively to change some of these statistics.
I agree. I agree completely. So as founder of the Yorkshire Sustainability Festival, I'm always keen to highlight positive things that are happening at a regional level. So what signs of progress are you seeing here in Yorkshire? A couple of things that I wanted to talk about here. I think first of all, Leeds Council have just commissioned a really piece of, interesting research around women's lives and the way and the work in the Leeds region and the wider West Yorkshire Combined Authority area.
And I think it highlights a number of obvious opportunities around getting more women to be economically active and also supporting more women to be effective leaders in the region. So that I think that's one to take a look at. The other thing is that Zandra Moore has been part of Of the high growth women led task force, which is a group of women led by on board and looking at how we can support female founders who are probably on the next stage of their growth journey.
So past sort of startup phase, possibly already landed some investment and now thinking about how to scale those businesses in Yorkshire, we haven't performed particularly well in that area. We're one of the lowest regions in terms of having women led businesses at that level. So we clearly need to do something different and Zandra has launched an amazing initiative which we're helping to run called the Lifted Project.
And in that Lifted Project she's setting up five major regional boards in five cities across the UK. So those cities are Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Birmingham. We're in the process of helping Zandra to appoint chairs of those regional boards. But essentially what they'll be doing is sort of bringing together community around female founders, but getting really clear what interventions are required.
And given that Zandra's background is that she runs an amazing data led business called Pun intelligence, you can probably guess that data's at the heart of this. So we're using a sort of deep dive into the data from each of those cities to understand where the gaps are in terms of supporting female founders.
So expect to hear a lot more from us around. you know, how much money per region is going to female founders, how many female founders are exiting in a region, what kind of funding is available to female founders, and all of that's being mapped out by city. That's going to provide a sort of dashboard from which then the regional boards can consider what kind of interventions and collaboration is required to change that environment because every city's different.
different in terms of the strengths it can play to. So this is a sustainability podcast. So why is gender equality such a huge part of being sustainable? So we know from lots of very important parts of pieces of research, and I would particularly point to the McKinsey research that says that, When you have diversity in a team, the results you're going to generate are going to be greater.
So this isn't necessarily an ESG or a diversity agenda. This is about performance. This is about impact. So we know that if you have a more diverse team and you're in a large organization, maybe in the FTSE 200, the top 25 percent of performers typically have a more diverse team. And that's because they create more diversity of thinking and an environment where everybody has the opportunity to succeed.
So I would always come back to the business reasons or the wider socio economic benefit of having diversity embedded into your thinking. Absolutely. And I would just add to that that the green economy grew at 9 percent last year in the UK, whereas the rest of the economy is in negative growth. So it's definitely worthwhile investing in sustainable businesses.
Right, let's do our best to actually answer the question. How do we work towards achieving goal number five of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls? Helen, you're going to be in charge here. I want one action point at every level, please. So we'll start with globally.
I like, I'm very much a believer that you should concentrate on the things that you can actually have an impact on and that you can change. So I would very much advocate that we, Globally not need to concentrate on promoting the business benefits of backing women We know that you're likely to get a bigger return from backing a female founder And probably get that return earlier because female founders exit more quickly And those are based on statistics from the british business bank So I think if we could just share that message more universally It would get that money flowing cross borders And you know, you know Cross Europe and in the UK and towards female founders and that would make a big difference.
Okay, so let's look at nationally then, then what could we do nationally? Given that we're sort of promoting the business benefits of backing women, I think the next thing is around collaboration and male allyship. Like, I think those two things together are immensely powerful. Like, how can we all come together around these two, these agendas to make a difference?
And I think that means thinking, Really carefully about how we can connect different organizations from different starters, whether that's third sector, public sector, private sector to come together to make it clear what the next step is for both female entrepreneurs, but also for female and investors in being more active in the space.
And finally, regionally. So a couple of, I would say a couple of things here. One is Lift Adventures. is aiming to change how much money is flowing towards female founders, but we still need more women on investment committees inside VCs. I think the statistic is about 13 percent of senior women. are on investment committees at the moment.
So that means that when female founders arrive at a VC, the panel that they're seeing is predominantly male. Yeah. And that can influence the questions they're being asked and the rigor to which some of the sort of tests that they're being put through are being conveyed. And I would say this has been done unconsciously.
I don't think any VCs trying specifically to make things more difficult for female founders, but it's just inbuilt from the, the sort of diversity element of the, of those investment committees. So I would say, yeah, let's have more gender equality inside VCs and let's see more of them signing up to the invest in women code, which is asking them to track the data points around things like diversity on the investment committee, how many female founders are they actually seeing, because having more in the pipeline means that they're more likely to have some later on in the, in the, going through the investment process.
And then how many female led businesses are they actually backing? And even if they just share the data, you know, I think that's a helpful first step. towards thinking about how to create a more equal environment. Okay, so our final question is always at an individual level. It's a stop and start. What we do is we ask everybody listening to stop doing one thing and start doing one thing today, right now, that will make a difference.
So, what would those two be? We will start with the stop. What would you ask people to stop doing? So, This may not resonate with everybody, but I think we need to stop talking about the fact that there's a massive gender funding gap. I think the 2 percent figure has been used too often and it's becoming a little bit like whitewash for some people.
They're not hearing it any longer. We need to start talking about why you should back women. The fact that for every pound invested, twice as much revenue is generated. The fact that you're going to get greater portfolio returns. I would like to see us move towards that rather than talking about supporting women as being something altruistic or something you should do from a CRSR perspective.
No, like there are good business reasons why you should be doing this. Absolutely. So your stop is stop talking about the 2 percent gap and start talking about the, uh, the fact that, we actually make a huge return on the investments that we're given. Absolutely, but I'm going to be cheeky and still have another.
Oh, go for it. Go for it. Yeah. I think the other start is like, we all know women who could potentially back other women in terms of being angel investors and they may be women in law, women in corporate environments, you know, women who have scaled their own business. You know, you don't need a huge amount of wealth to start being an angel investor.
I think if we could all encourage those women we know who've been successful to think about learning and how to be an angel investor, that would that would make a huge difference. So thank you so much to my guest Helen Alden for joining me today, and thank you to you all for listening to The Seventeen.
Please help us to grow the podcast by hitting the subscribe button on your podcast provider, and remember to leave us a review and tell your friends about us too. Remember, if you want to find out more about Yorkshire Sustainability Festival, which is coming up next week, In June, just head to ysf.
thessustainabilitycommunity. com. On there you can also get your tickets to the conference which will feature keynote speeches from the likes of Kevin MacLeod and Mary Portis OBE, which we're very excited about. That's all for now, we'll be back next month on the 17th with another episode of The 17.
Thanks very much for listening.