We are doing a number of things across the board, including working with partners. For example, we have done a number of events with Investing Women. That work involves looking at both sides of the equation: getting women in as investors, and investing in women-led businesses.
We have also worked with Women’s Enterprise Scotland, which has delivered a training course for our account managers to improve awareness of some of the gender-specific issues that businesses face.
We are also running a couple of European projects that have a focus on gender balance. There is a northern periphery project that looks at the challenges that are experienced by women starting up businesses in rural and sparsely populated areas—obviously, there is a strong connection there for the Highlands and Islands. That project involves work with partners in countries in the Arctic area—Finland, Sweden and Ireland—which have that predominance of rural and sparsely populated areas.
We also track women’s take-up of our business support programmes. The gender split of take-up of those programmes is quite interesting. We have a number of management and leadership programmes where the take-up is pretty well balanced between men and women.
The ones that stand out for me involve mentoring and the use of accelerators. We find that only 35 per cent of those who take up mentoring are women. Again, that poses some interesting questions. I was at a think tank that Women’s Enterprise Scotland organised last month—in fact, it had two parallel events, one all women and one all men. We are awaiting the report, but the all-women event had real focus on the importance of mentoring. Looking back at the figures, it is interesting that there still seems to be some in-built challenge to women taking up mentoring as part of our support.
On the use of growth accelerators, we found that the greatest traction for women involved in accelerator programmes was flexibility. In a virtual accelerator that we ran with Entrepreneurial-Spark, there was no requirement, which there often is, to be in a certain location for a certain number of hours; it was more flexible. That met our requirement of reaching some of our more rural areas; it also developed some of the flexibility that women entrepreneurs are obviously looking for.
We have a bit of detail around some of that data, which we could share if that would be helpful.