Creative Enterprise Female Entrepreneurs Brunch

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Recent studies show that numbers of female-led companies are on the rise, yet only 16% of applicants to Creative England business investments are from female founded companies. This week we held a brunch in Birmingham as part of the Creative Enterprise programme to discuss how we can support female entrepreneurs through the programme and increase engagement across Creative England activity.

At the brunch we welcomed Sue McHugh, founder of multi-award winning VR & AR agency Carbon Digital; Chelsea Slater, co-founder of InnovateHer and Liverpool Girl Geeks, two companies dedicated to decreasing the gender imbalance in tech; Bekki Wray-Rogers, co-founder of successful production company Duck Soup Films; Michael Gubbins, strategic lead at West Midlands Screen Bureau and Chair of Ffilm Cymru Wales; and Rachel Richardson-Jones, company director at  Not a Number Productions.

The discussion explored the reasons women may not apply for business support, why their applications may not be successful, and positive action that Creative England can take to encourage more female-led and female-founded companies to apply.

Creative England launched the Be More Boss campaign at the end of 2017, which profiled four female-founders of Creative England supported companies to highlight the lack of applications and celebrate some of the female leaders doing innovative work. The brunch looked at how we can continue the messaging of the campaign in a meaningful way, which can become embedded in Creative England’s culture long after the initial campaign moment.

Everyone at the brunch brought great ideas and examples of actions that would encourage female-founded companies to apply, and how we can make our processes more accessible to female entrepreneurs and creative companies. We will now be assessing the learnings from the day and putting them into action to make sure that as a company Creative England is embedding gender equality into the company’s culture, and doing as much as possible to support female entrepreneurs. Watch this space to see what we put in place!

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