From report to reality: Scotland's female founder movement is gaining momentum, by Nick Freer

There is a graveyard somewhere in Scotland filled with well-intentioned business reports. They arrive with fanfare, make important recommendations, generate a few headlines, then spend the rest of their lives gathering dust.

The Pathways report by Ana Stewart was always supposed to be different. I know that having had a ringside seat as a close adviser to Ana since the early stages of the work that became the Scottish Government-commissioned review into women in entrepreneurship.

I have seen first-hand the energy and persistence that has gone into turning its recommendations into something more useful than just another report.

The publication of the Stewart Report in 2023 was an important moment. But the real achievement has been what has stemmed from it.

Pathways Forward was created to maintain momentum and, crucially, turn diagnosis into action. Its most powerful innovation may be the simplest: the Pathways Pledge.

Rather than asking organisations to nod sympathetically at the gender imbalance in entrepreneurship before returning to business as usual, the Pledge asks them to do something about it.

Specific actions. Measurable commitments. A 12-month period in which progress can be tracked and, importantly, shared.

Scotland has never been short of initiatives designed to support entrepreneurs. What we have sometimes lacked is the collective discipline to ask whether the system itself is working. The Pathways Pledge is beginning to address that.

More than 40 organisations are now part of the growing Pathways community, representing more than 100 actions designed to increase diversity, opportunity and female participation across Scotland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

And this isn’t simply about fairness, it’s also about economics. If women are under-represented among entrepreneurs, investors and company leaders, Scotland is effectively operating with one hand tied behind its back. We are leaving talent, ideas, companies and ultimately economic growth on the table.

That is why the Pathways-run Female Founders Growth Summit at the beginning of October is not one to be missed. Starting a company is hard, scaling one is a different challenge altogether.

It requires capital, customers, talent, international networks and the confidence, from founders and investors alike, to believe that a Scottish company can become a global one.

This is where Ana’s work has evolved beyond a campaign about women in business. It is becoming part of the wider conversation about Scotland’s economic future.

Ana has taken an issue that could easily have been parked in the “diversity” box and made the much bigger case: that if Scotland wants more successful companies, more innovation and more economic growth, it needs to get better at finding, backing and scaling entrepreneurial talent wherever it exists.

Three years on from its publication, the Stewart Report has become a movement. That movement created commitments, and those commitments are beginning to change behaviour.

The summit provides another opportunity to push that process forward. Because ultimately, the measure of Pathways will not be how many reports it produces, pledges it signs or conferences it hosts. It will be the number of women who build companies that scale.

And perhaps one day we will no longer require a special initiative to make that happen.