Pathways Forward: year one results and year two pledges
Following Pathways, and going further
We're delighted to support Pathways Forward, an initiative led by Ana Stewart to transform participation rates for women in entrepreneurship.
In Pathways: A New Approach to Women in Entrepreneurship, the review published in 2023 by Ana Stewart and Mark Logan, there were two specific recommendations for the Bank:
- Recommendation 12: “Where the Scottish National Investment Bank acts as a Limited Partner to “cornerstone” a fund, such participation should be contingent on the fund manager having at least 20% of its senior investment personnel being women.”
- Recommendation 15: “Scotland should act strategically to establish the country as a global centre for Femtech start-ups” and as part of the recommendations detail “…SNIB should cornerstone a Femtech fund…”.
You can read more on our initial response to the above recommendations other related work at the following article, Following Pathways, and going further.
Year one results and year two pledges
As a member of the founding cohort of the Pathways Pledge, we recently reached the end of our first 12 month period and are proud to share the results of our first year Pledges:
- We committed to publishing anonymised data relating to EDI metrics, including gender. We worked towards this commitment by reviewing the data we already collect at key stages of the investment process and developing new legal agreements to collect and monitor data. Extended data collection is now embedded at 3 stages of our investment process, enabling us to gather and track activity, inform future activity, and publish this in our annual report.
- We also committed to developing a community of learning in relation to EDI within the portfolio of our investee businesses. We held a learning community event in September for companies in our investment portfolio titled ‘Promoting Inclusive Workplaces’. The session enabled open discussion on challenges and opportunities for investees. Feedback was positive with an average score of 7.5/10.
Taking learnings from our first year, we are continuing our commitment and have made the following pledges to be tracked for our second year:
- As an investor at the scale-up / growth stage, we are reliant on a strong pipeline of female powered businesses growing to this stage, so that we can increase the levels of investment we offer to these businesses. Our first pledge is therefore to support the broader ecosystem that enables this pipeline by working with and supporting early-stage female founders. A key element will be delivering a programme of targeted engagement / networking / education events, which we will either lead ourselves, or will work in partnership with others where we believe that to be the most efficient and effective approach.
- Publish insight into key opportunity areas for scaling female entrepreneurship (as they relate to our missions and the scale up landscape in Scotland)
- Develop SWIN (Scottish Women in Investment Network) to externalize and bring in other female investors in Scotland to develop, grow and raise prominence of a female finance allocators network
- Review our procurement strategy and work with suppliers to educate service providers and the supply chain network and (whenever relevant and proportionate) include questions on gender diversity within procurements and promote the inclusion of community benefits which support female participation.
If you’d like to learn more about EDI at the Bank, please take a look at the highlights in our Equality Commitment page.
