Gender Index report 2025 launched
The latest Gender Index report has been issued, revealing that Scotland led the way in the UK with female-led companies growing their turnover by 29%.
The Gender Index launched in 2022 with a mission to drive positive change in gender parity using data as evidence, and each year since then it’s analysed the UK company landscape, tracking the progress of female-led companies. It analyses active companies across all four UK nations, uncovering trends in leadership, diversity, industry representation, business growth, access to funding, investment patterns, and turnover performance.
The Scotland section is written by Dr Aylin Ates and Dr Paul Lassalle of the University of Strathclyde as well as Professor Eleanor Shaw, Professor Sreevas Sahasranamam and Dr Saurabh Lall of the University of Glasgow, and Dr Samuel Mwaura of Edinburgh University.
Notably, Scotland led the way in the UK with female-led companies growing their turnover by 29% – 5% higher than male-led average of 24%. The UK average for female-led growth was 24.6% and for men 21.6%. This suggests that Scottish companies are growing at a faster rate than all companies, and that Scottish female-led companies were growing faster than in any other region in the UK.
This may suggest that unlike the English regions, Home Nations’ governments and ecosystems might have greater powers and national structures to develop and implement interventions to support the growth of female-led companies, such as Pathways Forward in Scotland, that might be having a positive impact.
For 2024, the figure of all new incorporations in Scotland which were female-led continued to be stable across 2022, 2023 and 2024, with the 2024 figure standing at 20%, only marginally lower than the UK average of 20.5%. This means that 1 in 5 newly incorporated companies are set up by women – a figure that has endured in Scotland and across the UK for some time.
Comparing newly incorporated companies in Scotland by gender, the report finds that the overall profile for 2024 is broadly similar to that of 2023, with male-founded companies continuing to dominate at 63%, followed by female-founded at 20%, mixed-gender at 12% and unknown at 2%. The exception is that for male-founded companies - this figure has dropped from 67% in 2023, while corporate-led start-ups increased by approximately 2%.
In 2024, the total number of active companies in Scotland was just under 270,000 of which 155,000 were male-led and 48,000 were female-led, indicating a ratio of 3:1 which is broadly the same across the UK.
Analysis of the age at which companies are set up in Scotland suggests that women tend to start their companies at an older age than men.