The Leaked Memo: No. 10 Downing Street to Organize a Summit for Women in Business and Women Entrepreneurs

Downing Street

Last week the Guardian got hold of a leaked memo that summarizes the actions taken to get women to think more positive about the Government. The actions were proposed by a couple of women groups that advise the Cabinet Office and No. 10 on these issues.

A striking advice was to organize "A Big Push for Women in Business" and to hold a Summit of women entrepreneurs and women in at Dowing Street No. 10, with the aim to recognize and celebrate their success.

The reason for holding a summit was among others: "We haven't one yet." Now that can't be the reason alone is my thinking.

A Summit - just for the sake of a Summit - is not enough. A Summit makes sense when attached to it are goals, programmes and follow-up actions planned. A PR piece by itself - even in No. 10 -does not lead to customers, venture capital and growth.

Female entrepreneurs need a network and business program to get them access to capital and access to co-founders and to make them realize that it's all about timing and acceleration to grow a business.

There are many accelerators and incubators sprouting, such as Seedcamp, Springboard, Startup Leadership Programme, and it would be great to see a 50%-50% gender representation of participants, but as it stands now, this will need some time.

Seedcamp has a focus on technology founders and there are not enough of those among women. Springboard requires the founders to move to Cambridge for a couple of months, and many female founders cannot juggle that, and Startup Leadership Programme has an age limitation, while many female founders are over 35 years.

At Astia, the accelerator for women led companies, only high growth women entrepreneurs are asked to join that are fundable; it means some female founders may not fit into the Astia network (yet).

Also, I see a lot of female entrepreneurs who not necessarily want to join the Government supported Tech City crowd to grow their business. Tech City is a great initiative and it creates a lot of buzz, but with the limited focus on technology founders and with its events that cater for young people - beer, pizza and music - it misses a lot of female founders with great ideas and companies who do not relate to that.

So it's great to read in the leaked memo that another idea is to revisit Tech City and Engineering Prize Plan with a view toward female entrepreneurship and female representation.

Indeed, there is room for an incubation and startup programme that has a focus on startup founders that need to grow their idea from incubation and on.

We have advised Barones Wilcox of our thoughts here through the female entrepreneur circle she set up last June.And now that is this Document, marked 'restricted-policy', on how to get more support from women was written by officials in Number 10 and circulated to government departments.

Let's see whether the Summit is the start of a new focus on women in business that means ACTION.