It’s a scene playing out in homes across the country: a woman balances a laptop on one knee and a toddler on the other while trying to prepare for a pitch, book childcare and chase invoices before dinner. She’s not just running a business; she’s running a household, a career and an obstacle course of assumptions.
In the background, a partner — perhaps supportive, perhaps not — glances up from his own screen, the expectation still hanging in the air: hers is the flexible role. She can scale back. She will fill the gaps.
And yet, she may be the one with the bigger vision. The one building a business. The one with more growth and earning potential — if only the system and society could keep up.
• Meet the bosses building better workplaces for women — and why it matters
Let’s start with a hard fact: the gender pay gap in the UK remains stubborn. In April 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the gap for full‑time employees stood at 7 per cent, down slightly from 7.5 per cent the year before. Taking part‑time employees into account, the gap was 13.1 per cent — a significant disparity.
At the heart of the matter is the “motherhood penalty”. This month, the ONS revealed that, on average, women lose £65,618 in earnings in the first five years after the birth of their first child — a drop of 42 per cent in monthly earnings compared with the year before childbirth. That figure rises only with subsequent children: another £26,300 after a second child and £32,400 after a third.
• The true cost of motherhood? Start with £65,000 in lost earnings
This “motherhood penalty” is compounded by the uneven take-up of shared parental leave, the policy introduced by the coalition government in 2015 to persuade couples to share childcare in a more balanced way. Allowing partners to share up to 50 weeks of leave and up to 37 weeks of pay between them, it is, in theory, a progressive policy that encourages the non-birthing partner to take a more active role in their child’s upbringing from the very beginning.
In practice, uptake remains dismally low: only about 2 per cent to 8 per cent of eligible fathers take it.
Both cultural and financial factors are to blame. Many families simply can’t afford for the higher earner — still usually the man — to take extended periods of leave, especially if employers don’t choose to offer enhanced packages and it’s paid at the statutory minimum.
More deeply, there remains a persistent stigma that men taking time out for caring are less committed to their careers. But until we shift the cultural perception that childcare is women’s work, shared leave will remain underused — and women will continue to bear the brunt of interrupted careers, lost earnings and putting plans to start their own businesses on ice.
If the first issue is the pay gap — the topic of this week’s episode of our new podcast, The Business — the second is the entrepreneurship gap.
Countless studies have shown that women start fewer businesses than men, and if they do, they get less access to growth capital and less frequently grow their ventures to a significant scale. The findings of an inquiry from the women and equalities committee (WEC) of the House of Commons just last week reminded us of the stark reality. Only 20 per cent of businesses are female‑led, and just 2 per cent of venture capital in 2024 went to back a female founder (down from 2.5 per cent in 2023).
The WEC also estimated that if women entrepreneurs were funded to the same level as men, the UK could unlock an extra £250 billion in growth.
So, if we are serious about closing the gender pay gap and encouraging women to start and scale businesses at the same rate as men, then the change required is not just policy tweaks or funding programmes. Crucially, it’s cultural and societal. We need to become cheerleaders of the idea of women as breadwinners, women as risk‑taking founders, women scaling aggressively, and women earning as much as (or more than) male counterparts.
Cultural and societal norms matter. Even when policies exist — mentorship programmes, grants for women entrepreneurs, transparent pay reporting — they often run up against narratives that reinforce who is seen as the default earner or founder. Female founders often hear questions about how they will manage home life, or when they are going to have children. Those kinds of questions rarely get asked of male founders.
The WEC report identifies that structural barriers around maternity and caring are deeply embedded in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Meanwhile, within households and workplaces, the idea of a woman being the main earner still sometimes carries an awkwardness. The expectation remains: men should provide, women may top up.
One of the most impressive female founders I’ve met is Katrina Hutchinson-O’Neill of Join Talent, an outsourced HR provider with clients including Amazon and Microsoft. From a standing start at her kitchen table in 2019, the company, based in Brechin, Scotland, grew to sales of £17.5 million in 2022, topping The Sunday Times 100 ranking of the UK’s fastest-growing private companies.
At the time she started the company, she had three children under the age of ten and a husband who was the deputy head of a large private school. When the company took off and the family bought a large house in need of renovation, it became clear that something had to give, and Gareth quit his job in 2022.
For Hutchinson-O’Neill, there was nothing unusual about it: her own mother was the sole earner in her family growing up in Northern Ireland. That was after her policeman father was medically discharged having been shot during the Troubles and breaking his back policing a riot.
Others, though, have struggled more with the gender role reversal. She recalled a business associate suggesting that her husband was “less of a man” because she ran the business and “wore the trousers”. At their children’s school events, people often don’t recognise her.
Does she feel she’s missing out? “I guess I miss it as much as a man would,” she said. And Gareth? “He couldn’t care less what anybody else thinks. His view has always been he just cares about our family and whether we’re all happy.”
Another example of a powerhouse of a female breadwinner is Pippa Begg, the chief executive of Board Intelligence, a technology company that was bought by American private equity firm K1 just over a year ago for £230 million. When it became clear that her role was going to include more travel as Board Intelligence expands globally, her husband quit his senior role at Reckitt, the consumer goods giant. He now consults part-time, around doing the school runs for their three young children.
Policy still matters, especially when it’s followed with action, and the WEC report makes several recommendations: a “female entrepreneurship strategy”; ministerial accountability; ring‑fenced growth funding; transparent data on investment in women‑led firms; and targets for procurement from women‑led businesses. However, without the cultural shift, policy will always chafe against invisible assumptions.
Lastly, the narrative must shift. We must stop seeing women’s success as “against the odds” but instead as part of the everyday story of business. A woman leading a FTSE firm or building a high-growth start-up (and becoming the household’s primary earner in either scenario) isn’t an anomaly. It’s the future — and it should feel entirely unremarkable.