On 8 July 2026, the Department for Business and Trade published the sixth annual report on the Investing in Women Code, a government-backed commitment intended to improve access to finance for women-led businesses. Its main finding was narrow but important: for the sixth consecutive year, signatories directed a greater proportion of funding to female-founded businesses than the wider market. For policy officials, lenders and investors, that result matters because the Code is built around disclosure as much as signalling. Annual reporting creates a clearer picture of where capital is going, which institutions are changing their practices, and where barriers to entry still sit within the market.
The scale of the initiative has shifted substantially since launch. According to the Department, the Code has grown from 12 signatories in 2019 to more than 330 organisations in 2026, including most major UK retail banks alongside venture capital firms, angel investors and lenders. New signatories this year include Nationwide and Innovate U. That expansion changes the weight of the exercise. A larger signatory base means more firms are collecting comparable data, assigning senior responsibility for equality in their engagement with entrepreneurs, and testing whether internal processes are excluding viable founders. In practical terms, the annual dataset now covers enough of the market to be useful beyond a pilot stage.
The report does not argue that the funding gap has been resolved. The Department for Business and Trade said women-led businesses still receive a disproportionately small share of overall investment, despite the stronger relative performance among signatories. That distinction is important. Outperforming the market is not the same as correcting the market. For business finance policy, the point is that progress can be real and still be incomplete. Better performance among signatories suggests institutional behaviour can change when firms measure outcomes and publish results. It also shows that improvement within one part of the market does not automatically produce fairer outcomes across the whole system.
The Code asks signatories to adopt practices intended to improve women's access to finance, nominate a senior leadership figure responsible for equality in interactions with entrepreneurs, and provide annual gender-disaggregated funding data to the Department. Of those commitments, the reporting requirement is arguably the most consequential because it shifts debate from anecdote to evidence. For founders, the effects are indirect but material. Better reporting can influence how lenders and investors review pipelines, how they assess conversion rates, where they direct outreach, and whether product design is working evenly across applicant groups. For government, the data provides a basis for deciding whether the current approach is producing enough movement or whether stronger intervention should be considered.
Ministers are pairing the Code with direct funding measures. The Government said the Invest in Women Taskforce has deployed more than £70 million from a £635 million funding pool in its first year, with the stated aim of improving the flow of capital to women-led firms. The British Business Bank is pursuing a related approach through its £400 million Investor Pathways Capital Initiative, which is intended to support emerging fund managers and widen access to investment opportunities. In the period immediately before the report's publication, the Bank said it had committed £90 million through that programme to ten new funds, with women making up more than half of the general partners in the cohort. Taken together, those measures show a policy approach that combines transparency rules with attempts to alter who controls investment decisions and where funding is directed.
The annual report also includes founder case studies to show how early backing can change a company's financing path. One example is Gaia Learning, an online school for neurodivergent learners founded by Kate Heath. After entering the Baltic Ventures Accelerator in 2023, the business received mentoring, business support and a £50,000 pre-seed investment. According to the Department's account, that early support helped Gaia Learning speed up product development and secure more than £600,000 in follow-on funding. Heath was later named Great British Entrepreneur of the Year in 2025. Case studies do not replace market-wide evidence, but they help illustrate why access at pre-seed stage can matter disproportionately for founders trying to reach later rounds.
Blair McDougall, the Minister for Small Business and Economic Transformation, presented the findings as evidence that backing female founders supports both business performance and economic growth. Kristen McLeod of the British Business Bank took a similar line, saying the direction of change is positive while accepting that barriers across the finance market remain. For departments focused on growth, the 2026 report provides an evidence base for keeping female entrepreneurship inside mainstream business finance policy rather than treating it as a specialist agenda. For lenders and investors, the test over the next reporting cycle is more concrete: whether stronger disclosure, senior accountability and targeted funds produce a materially larger share of capital reaching women-led firms. The report indicates progress among signatories. It does not indicate that the wider access gap has closed.