The headline from the Department for Business and Trade’s annual report, published on 8 July 2026, is straightforward: organisations signed up to the Investing in Women Code are still doing a better job of funding female founders than the wider market. For the sixth year in a row, signatories directed a larger share of finance to female-founded businesses than the market average. That matters because it shifts the debate from good intentions to measurable results. The report’s message is not simply that support for women-led firms looks fairer on paper, but that a broader approach to backing entrepreneurs is proving commercially sensible too.

What has changed most is the scale of the scheme. The government-backed Code started with 12 signatories in 2019 and now has more than 330 organisations attached to it, including most major UK retail banks, venture capital firms, angel investors and lenders. New names joining in 2026 include Nationwide and Innovate U. That growth gives the Code more weight than it had in its early years. It is no longer a niche pledge sitting on the edge of the finance market. It now covers a meaningful part of the institutions that decide which founders get an early chance to build, hire and grow.

For Market Pulse UK readers, this is really a capital allocation story. If strong businesses are being missed because the market keeps backing a narrower founder profile, that is not just a social problem. It is a growth problem. Small Business Minister Blair McDougall framed it in exactly those terms, arguing that backing female founders is good for business and good for growth. The annual figures support that case. When lenders and investors measure what they are doing and are asked to account for it, the flow of capital appears to become less skewed.

The founder case study in the report helps put real numbers behind the policy language. Kate Heath, founder and chief executive of Gaia Learning, joined the Baltic Ventures Accelerator in 2023 and received mentoring, business support and a £50,000 pre-seed investment. According to the government’s account, that early backing helped the company speed up product development and go on to secure more than £600,000 in follow-on funding. Gaia Learning, which focuses on online education for neurodivergent learners, is a useful example because it shows what early-stage finance is meant to do. It is not only about getting a business over the line in the short term. Done properly, first funding can pull in expertise, credibility and the next round of investors as well. Heath’s recognition as Great British Entrepreneur of the Year in 2025 suggests that the initial support arrived at a genuinely formative point.

Still, the report does not pretend the gap has been solved. Even with signatories outperforming the wider market, women-led businesses continue to receive a disproportionately small share of total investment. That is the figure that should keep both policymakers and investors honest. In practical terms, progress inside a better-performing group of banks and funds can sit alongside a stubbornly unequal market overall. If the wider finance system continues to write too few cheques to women-led firms, improvement at the margins will not be enough on its own. The useful part of this year’s report is that it keeps that tension in view rather than declaring victory too early.

There is also a wider policy push behind the headline. The government says its Invest in Women Taskforce has already deployed more than £70 million from a £635 million funding pool in its first year. Alongside that, the British Business Bank is using its £400 million Investor Pathways Capital Initiative to support newer fund managers and widen access to investment opportunities. The British Business Bank added another marker last week when it committed £90 million through that programme to ten new funds, with women making up more than half of the general partners in the cohort. That detail matters. Who controls investment committees and who signs off capital often shapes which businesses are taken seriously in the first place.

The balanced reading, then, is that the UK has evidence of progress but not permission for complacency. The Investing in Women Code is growing, the signatories are still ahead of the market, and the founder examples show that targeted backing can translate into jobs, product development and scale. But the broader market still has work to do. For banks, funds and SME advisers, the commercial point is now hard to ignore: widening the pool of founders who get funded is not charity and it is not box-ticking. It is a better attempt to avoid missing viable businesses. The bigger test for 2027 is whether the rest of the market starts catching up with the institutions that are already measuring themselves.