One conversation at a time: How we got female entrepreneurship onto Essex’s policy agenda

Our project, on the real challenges female entrepreneurs in Essex face, and what policy could do to close the gaps, is almost three years older than the report we eventually published this year. The idea that Essex needed its own, honest, place-based picture of female entrepreneurship first came up two or three years ago, in a conversation with Eve Calderbank, who was already building a community for women in business across the county. Julian Gibbs, from Anglia Ruskin University’s (ARU) Research and Innovation Development Office, had introduced us. We agreed there was a gap. We agreed somebody should look at it properly. Then, for a long time, nothing happened, because there was no funding attached to the idea and no obvious home for it. It sat there, half-formed, until last year, when ARU finally backed it and we could get off the ground.

Once we started, the first obstacle wasn’t methodological – it was personal. I am an academic, and the women I wanted to talk to run businesses, often alone and often exhausted. There is a real, usually unspoken sense that we live in different worlds. Turning up once with a set of interview questions was never going to close that gap, so instead our team showed up repeatedly, at the same networking events, becoming familiar faces rather than visiting researchers and resisting the urge to lead with our own expertise.

Once we stopped selling our project and just showed up with curiosity about people’s working lives, the conversations changed. Women told us about the loneliness, the near misses, the funding meetings that had gone nowhere, and something we hadn’t expected too: many had already been quietly supporting each other for years and wanted their experience to count for something beyond their own business. We would never have known that if we hadn’t got close enough to ask.

Our team showed up repeatedly, at the same networking events, becoming familiar faces rather than visiting researchers and resisting the urge to lead with our own expertise.

What we found justified our patience. Essex has one of the largest business populations in England, and in several districts, women-led firms are growing faster than men-led ones. Yet funding data told a bleaker story: in some districts, women-led businesses were accessing only a small fraction of the loans and investment men-led businesses received. The interviews explained what the numbers alone couldn’t. Support was often found “by accident”, and caring responsibilities had never been designed into how or when help was offered.

We could have written a standard set of recommendations and moved on. Instead we used Cohered Emergent Theory, developed by my colleague Dr Frank Nyame-Asiamah. This approach defers to what people already know about their own lives, gives them real power to shape the answer, and holds everyone’s interests together rather than let one voice dominate.

In practice, that meant getting entrepreneurs, council officers, bank and finance representatives, business organisations and communities into the same room, as equals, while the recommendations were still being worked out. In some ways, this was a harder challenge than earning the entrepreneurs’ trust. We were fortunate that Eve now works as business growth manager at Essex Growth Agency, which opened doors to local government we’d otherwise have taken far longer to reach. Everything after that was colder: researching officers, sending cold emails and LinkedIn messages, hearing back from some and not others. Policymakers are busy and their priorities are set before anyone gets in touch. On top of this, we probably hadn’t found the right sentence to make our work matter to them.

The interviews kept surfacing something policy alone won’t fix: it isn’t only access to funding that holds women back, it’s whether they believe their work is worth what they’re charging for it.

Once we did get people in the room, what we got was real awareness: officers sitting with issues they hadn’t had to face before, and business owners hearing that barriers they’d assumed were personal were actually shared. We launched the report in June in that same spirit, to a room that included the policymakers and businesswomen who had shaped it. But awareness in a room is not a promise, and it was never going to be enough on its own. That’s still true now. We’re reaching further, toward senior officials and Parliament, trying to turn a room of nodding heads into something that changes how support is designed and funded. It is a slower, harder journey than the workshops were and it takes real, ongoing commitment rather than one good meeting.

We’re also carrying the more personal half of what we learned into what comes next: building a working relationship with business coaching networks and women’s business communities. The interviews kept surfacing something policy alone won’t fix: it isn’t only access to funding that holds women back, it’s whether they believe their work is worth what they’re charging for it. Helping women see their own value, and to price accordingly, matters as much as any policy change.

That’s the main thing three years of this work has taught us. Getting research into policy conversations doesn’t happen through a single funding application, launch event or handoff. It takes ordinary, repeated effort: showing up again, following up on contacts who didn’t reply the first time, and continuing to make the case to people more senior than the ones who agreed to listen at the start.