The Lifted Project: Unlocking opportunity for female founders

At The Gender Index, we use data to bring greater visibility to the journeys of female-led companies across the UK. Our work highlights where progress is being made, and where barriers still exist. Initiatives like The Lifted Project are helping to reshape that landscape, offering ways to open up space for more women to lead, grow, and be recognised. Their work aligns closely with what our 2025 report shows: that when female-led companies are supported, they thrive.

In the current investment landscape, female-led companies receive significantly less investment in comparison to male-led companies. This funding gap leads to less growth, innovation and regional opportunities.The Lifted Project is confronting this head-on with a bold, data-driven mission: to increase the flow of capital to female-led businesses outside London.

Led by Zandra Moore, Chair of The Lifted Project, this five-year initiative is grounded in the belief that regional economies are rich with untapped female founder potential. 

A new model for regional growth

The Lifted Project operates through five Regional Boards in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham – all cities with strong economic foundations.

These Boards act as hyper-local, data-powered engines of connectivity, sharing capital, networks, and expertise across regions that have often been overlooked.

Each region is tasked with meeting ambitious, measurable targets:

• Increase capital investment into female founders by 5%
• Attract at least one new fund to each region
• Ensure 50% of funding portfolios at seed to growth stage are female-founded
• Double the number of visible female founders
• Expand adoption of the Invest in Women Code across regional funds

From isolation to inclusion

Despite proven performance, female-led businesses remain consistently underfunded and underrepresented, particularly outside London. The Lifted Project addresses this by closing structural gaps in visibility and investment, transforming overlooked regions into engines of inclusive growth. 

As The Gender Index data shows, when women do secure funding, they deliver, with turnover growth in female-led companies now outpacing their male-led counterparts. Supporting these founders means boosting local economies, diversifying the innovation pipeline, and ensuring that the UK’s entrepreneurial future reflects its full talent base.

The Lifted Project also has a commitment to the community. Events like The Athena Festival, which recently brought together women entrepreneurs in the North, are helping to build confidence and unlock aspiration.

Driving the future of UK entrepreneurship

The Lifted Project is more than an initiative; it challenges the status quo and offers a new vision, one where women in every region have access to the capital, networks, and support they need to lead and grow. The Gender Index data consistently shows that while female founders are thriving in many areas, regional disparities and systemic barriers still hold too many back.

If we’re serious about closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship, we can’t just back women, we must build the systems that back them better. That’s at the heart of what The Gender Index exists to support: uncovering where those systems fall short and where change is most needed.

By aligning local data, national policy, and capital incentives, The Lifted Project offers a blueprint for regional female entrepreneurship. It proves that the barriers holding women back are not insurmountable, they’re systemic, and systems can be redesigned.

For more about The Lifted Project, visit: https://theliftedproject.co.uk/

To explore the data about Female led companies read The Gender Index 2025 Report: https://www.thegenderindex.co.uk/uploads/Reports/TGI-2025-report.pdf