The Invest in Women Taskforce launched in 2024 with a clear enough objective: deploy capital at scale to female-led fund managers and female-founded businesses. Its purpose was also to encourage more investment in female entrepreneurship and to signpost where to go for help; the evolution it was moving into was what support these signatories were driving. Two years later, its flagship fund of funds has not deployed a pound of it. MPs on the Women and Equalities Committee have called the pace “tippy-toe.” Sifted described the initiative as “chaotic and second-class.” The economic opportunity it is supposed to be addressing has continued to widen in the meantime.
The timing creates an unavoidable comparison. The Invest in Women Taskforce was designed, in large part, as the implementation vehicle for what the Rose Review identified. The gap between the two is worth understanding precisely.
When Dame Alison Rose published the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship in 2019, it was the first government-commissioned study of why women started and scaled businesses at lower rates than men. The mechanism it operated through was straightforward: document the barriers with enough specificity to make denial difficult, then create an institutional code that financial organisations could sign publicly and be held to. The Investing in Women Code now has 290 signatories, including most major UK retail banks, up from 12 when it launched. By 2022, 156,000 new women-owned businesses had been created in the UK, a 33% increase from the 2018 baseline before the Review launched. Young women aged 16 to 25 founded nearly 17,500 businesses in 2022, more than 22 times the pre-Review number.
The gains came from institution-level behaviour change: changing what financial organisations were publicly committed to doing, and measuring whether they did it. Dame Alison Rose’s approach to the problem in 2019 worked partly because it gave institutions something they could act on without clearing a compliance and fund governance process first.
The Taskforce’s fund of funds faces exactly that complexity. Building an investment vehicle that meets institutional standards, selects fund managers and clears regulatory requirements takes time even when the process functions well. The characterisation from Sifted suggests it may not have. Liberal Democrat MP Alex Brewer told the Women and Equalities Committee the government was proceeding at a “tippy-toe” pace rather than “great big strides.” Committee Chair Sarah Owen described closing the gender funding gap as “a massive prize” that should sit at the centre of the government’s growth strategy.
What makes the delay particularly visible is the state of the underlying data. VC investment in all-female founding teams stood at less than 1% when Dame Alison Rose published the Rose Review in 2019. Success was also measured in the number of women starting businesses, in the growing confidence of young women founding companies, and in the increased support available to them; the Rose Review was all about practical help and support, driving this agenda to the top of the business and commercial agenda. By 2024 VC funding was still at 2%. By 2025 it had fallen to 1.3%, according to a Barclays analysis that puts the total economic opportunity of closing the gender entrepreneurship gap at £310 billion, £60 billion higher than the Review’s original estimate adjusted for inflation. The Rise Report, a 2025 survey of 2,225 UK-based female founders, found that 45% cite access to funding as their primary obstacle. One in ten reported experiencing dismissive or obstructive investor behaviour.
These figures are the Taskforce’s mandate in numerical form. They are also the measure by which its performance will eventually be judged. The fund architecture required to move institutional capital into female-led fund managers is genuinely complicated, and a first close is now expected in 2026. The more specific risk is that while the governance machinery is still being assembled, the founders who should benefit from it are raising, or failing to raise, on exactly the same terms as before the Taskforce existed.
The Rose Review’s legacy in this space was partly methodological. Dame Alison Rose framed the problem in commercial rather than charitable terms from the start, an approach that proved more durable for building institutional commitment than equity arguments alone. The 290 Code signatories are there because signing was commercially justifiable, not because banks felt they had no choice. The commercial framing has carried into her current work: she chairs the Financial Alliance for Women, a global network that makes the business case for financial inclusion alongside the moral one. It also highlighted barriers and practical solutions, and saw an increase in visibility and support, increasing numbers of women starting businesses and initial momentum to drive capital to those businesses, which were and are driving real contribution to the economy.
The Taskforce wants to go further than access and standards work; it aims to deploy actual capital to female-led fund managers at scale. That is a legitimate ambition. Business formation gains are measurable; the VC funding gap has barely shifted. Getting capital to female-led fund managers who can then fund female-founded companies is the step the Code was never designed to take. The question is whether the implementation design is equal to the ambition. Two years without a deployment is the evidence currently on the table.
But at the end of the day, what the Rose Review demanded was real change: a shift in capital to the businesses run by women where barriers were real, and where value and productivity for the UK economy were being left untapped. The urgency of this problem remains, the opportunity is considerable, and action needs to follow.
