Tackling Gender Eqality In The Workplace 

Over the years, the financial services industry has been known for a lack of gender diversity, even though there are more women in today’s workforce than ever before. It’s important that we highlight that there is still so much more that we can do as business owners to ensure equality is prevalent within our workforce, by offering a fair playing field through efforts to ensure human resource management and employee diversity is held in high regard.

At Rise Ventures we have been very successful in creating a fair playing field for employees, to date we have a clear 50/50 split of male and female employees within the business. Whilst the most important point is to build a quality workforce, we must also ensure the best skills are matched to each opportunity we have available, whilst offering opportunities to people from all backgrounds.

A comment from our Co-Founder, Liam Allwood:

“Diversity and inclusion are top of the list when it comes to growing our team. This doesn’t come without it’s challenges, as most applicants in our industry are male – we equal the odds when we shortlist applicants for an interview by ensuring we offer opportunities to people of all backgrounds regardless of gender, race, or beliefs.”

We realise that our impact can reach much further than our employees, but also for the businesses that we represent. In 2020, Only 3% of VC funding (pre-seed to Series B) went to all female teams. As a venture brokerage, our opportunities for investors are vetted with ESG metrics at the forefront of considerations. Some of the key Social and Governance factors take employee and board diversity into consideration, and whilst we may not expect an early-stage business to excel in these areas, we expect established businesses to have adopted policies to ensure a fair playing field is adhered to.

We are forever looking to represent more female founded businesses, with demands from our investor base of both individuals and institutions for more opportunities to support diversity along with our company goals to support founders of all backgrounds. Since the covid-19 pandemic there has been a large tilt towards pro ESG investing, with more funds going towards female founded business than ever before, it is very encouraging move from our industry – but there is still work to be done!

Stay tuned to see how we continue to expand our team and support founders of all backgrounds to achieve their fundraising goals.