We've been featuring a lot of awards in our magazine. But just to add to our dazzlingly long list, have a look at the Girls Make your Mark award. It is a UK award for young women who have set up their own company, instituted with a view to encouraging more female entrepreneurs to follow.

A panel of prominent businesswomen including Jacqueline Gold, Head of Ann Summers, Carrie Grant, vocal coach to the stars, and Natasha Aitken, Editor of handbag.com, will pick four women to win awards in these categories:

• Female Entrepreneur of the Year
• Entrepreneurs with a Conscience
• The Pioneer (for businesses less than 12 months old or an enterprising idea)
• Handbags and Gladrags (an award for a fashion or beauty business which is making its mark in this field)

The awards are open to entries until 21st July 2008, so you have to be quick if you to enter still.

The Girls Make your Mark Award is part of a broader UK campaign: the Girls! Make Your Mark campaign, launched to respond to the disparity between men and women when it comes to setting up a business.  The campaign has a number of ambassadors that help and inspire more women to set up their own business.

Campaigns like these seem very useful when we consider figures such as reported by the  Global Entrepreneurship Monitor which show that:

• Men start up 150,000 more businesses a year than women
• If the UK had the same rates of female entrepreneurship as the US we could have around three quarters of a million more businesses
• If more women get into the economy, UK productivity could be boosted by up to £23 billion, worth 2 per cent of GDP

Plenty of room to make you mark it seems!

Jacqueline Gold, founder of Ann Summers, joined the Girls Make your Mark campaign today. See here for a video of her role and her advice for female entrepreneurs.