Increasing Female Entrepreneurs and SMEs

Mary has led initiatives on female-led enterprises, because she believes strongly it matters to encourage women to believe they can start and scale their own businesses.

  • Focused on SMEs and female entrepreneurship in her role on the Women's Business Council
  • Organised start-up workshops for women, to encourage them to set up their own businesses. An example of one great female who attended - https://www.marthabrook.com/ 
  • Became the Prime Minister's Small Business Ambassador for London and held roundtables for the Prime Minister to meet female entrepreneurs, 2013-2015

The Rose Review

Amazing work has been done in the Rose Report in 2019, when HM Treasury commissioned Alison Rose, the CEO of NatWest, to lead an independent review of female entrepreneurship. She found that up to £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as UK men. Alison has made brilliant progress with trying to break down barriers that prevent progress, which can be seen in the annual updates:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-alison-rose-review-of-fe…

https://www.natwestgroup.com/news/2022/02/nwg-rose-review-reports-third…