Innovate UK's FOI Outrage! Eight in Ten of Own Assessors Were Male.
- Shawn Jhanji
- May 8
- 4 min read
Here Is What Is Finally Changing.
A freedom of information request that nobody should have needed to file found that 81 per cent of the assessors for Innovate UK's Women in Innovation programme were male. Not a percentage from an anonymous third-party study. The publicly funded body specifically designed to support female founders was using panels that were four-fifths male to evaluate their applications.
The data underneath is equally stark. In the programme's most recent cycle, Innovate UK received 1,452 applications. More than half scored above 70 per cent on the body's own criteria. It funded 25 of them and left £2 million of its budget unspent.
This is the kind of structural number that The Rise Report 2026 refuses to let pass quietly.
The report, published earlier this year, surveyed 2,225 female founders across the UK who between them turn over £1 billion annually and employ 9,300 people. It is the most comprehensive portrait of female entrepreneurship in Britain published in 2026, and its opening chapters make for uncomfortable reading for anyone who works inside a publicly funded innovation system.
But The Rise Report does not stop at the problem. That is why it is worth reading closely now, because the structural responses to exactly this kind of data are beginning to accumulate.
What Is Changing
In March 2026, the Women Backing Women fund closed its first tranche at £130 million. The fund is structured as a fund of funds, investing in female-led venture funds rather than directly into companies. The multiplier effect is deliberate: more female fund managers means more capital evaluated through lenses the existing system demonstrably lacks. The first close was anchored by Barclays, the British Business Bank, M&G and Nationwide. The fund targets £250 million at final close.
The fund is led by Fatou Diagne and Stephanie Heller of Bootstrap Europe, alongside Matthias Ummenhofer of Mojo Capital. These are not diversity initiatives staffed by committees. They are fund managers with investment track records and an explicit mandate to back female-led funds that will back female-led companies.
This is a direct structural response to what The Rise Report documents. Not a workaround but an intervention at the allocation layer:
if the people deploying capital are more diverse, the founders receiving capital become more likely to be as well.
The Data Architecture Is Improving
Separately, a coalition of UK startups and venture capital firms has launched a shared framework to track diversity data across the industry. The UK Diversity Data Alliance, reported by Sifted, is designed to gather standardised information about founders and investors, making it possible to track whether the capital allocation patterns documented in The Rise Report are actually changing over time.
This matters because the problem with diversity in venture capital has historically been resistant to accountability as much as to change. The data exists in fragments across different methodologies and different institutions. A shared framework changes that. It makes underperformance visible at the sector level, and visible underperformance is actionable in a way that anecdote is not.
The Institutional Response
Innovate UK has committed to recruiting a more diverse assessor pool, targeting 50 per cent female assessors, and embedding equality, diversity and inclusion guidance into assessor onboarding. These are commitments, not yet outcomes, and The Rise Report categorises them appropriately. But they represent an institutional acknowledgement that the problem is structural rather than incidental. That acknowledgement matters. Systemic change does not begin without it.
The Forward View
What this landscape looks like in three years depends primarily on whether the infrastructure being built now actually deploys capital to the founders it is designed to reach. Women Backing Women will be judged by its portfolio in 2027 and 2028. The UK Diversity Data Alliance will be judged by whether its framework produces accountability or collects dust. Innovate UK will be judged by whether its assessor pool changes and whether that changes its funding decisions.
For founders navigating this environment now, the practical shift is that more capital is being specifically oriented toward underrepresented pipelines than at any previous point in the UK's venture history. That does not mean the system is fixed. It means there are more doors to knock on, and some of those doors are now being opened by people who have experienced the same structural barriers from the other side of the table.
The Rise Report is a document about a system in transition. The data it surfaces is uncomfortable. The direction it points toward is genuinely more hopeful than the numbers it opens with.
Key Takeaways
The Rise Report 2026 found 81% of Innovate UK's Women in Innovation assessors were male; the programme funded 25 of 1,452 applicants and left £2 million unspent
Women Backing Women closed at £130 million in March 2026, backed by Barclays, the British Business Bank, M&G and Nationwide, targeting £250 million at final close
The UK Diversity Data Alliance has launched a shared standardised framework to track founder and investor diversity across the venture sector
Innovate UK has committed to a 50% female assessor target and updated onboarding guidance
Structural reform is real but early; Women Backing Women and the Diversity Data Alliance framework will be judged by outcomes over the next 18 to 24 months
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