Why ‘Women-led’ SMEs?

I’ve been asked a few times recently why I’m focusing on women-led SMEs in particular and I’ll try to articulate it as best I can.

Disclaimer: A blanket ‘not all men’ applies. I shouldn’t need to say that, but here we are, living in our post-nuance world in 2025, so.

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I’ve spoken before about how rapidly we – locally, nationally, globally – were able to make significant changes to our working patterns as Covid hit. Once we’d navigated the initial few weeks, it was surprising how innovative our collective response was, allowing the majority of us to carry on with some form of work.

Obviously, not everyone managed to carry on working. A lot of roles in a lot of sectors had no choice but to shut down completely. Office for National Statistics (ONS) stats suggest that around 25% of the UK workforce was unable to undertake any work at all during the strictest lockdown periods, while around 60–65% of the workforce was able to continue working in some capacity, either remotely or with modified on-site arrangements.

For the record, despite having been fully remote for a decade at this point, the sector I was working in closed down pretty much completely for a good chunk of time. So, while about 25–30% of UK workers were in ‘remote-ready’ roles, whether one could transition to fully remote still depended on the ability to function of the sector/industry itself.

It wasn’t easy but it was possible

Lockdown was shit, living and working during lockdown was shit and there are no retrospective rose tinted glasses here.

But we did still manage to get things done. Imperfectly, yes, but done.

It was horrible motivation but it motivated us all nonetheless.

Now we are (mostly) out of that dreadful situation and trying to return to the status quo.

Which to be honest, just seems nuts to me.

I get why we might collectively seek to put it all behind us, like it never happened, but face it: it did happen. We are still seeing the ramifications of that period in our lives in a variety of ways, not least the affects of long covid on people’s ability to work.

Our attempt to return to the ‘olden days’ has its own ramifications, from shoving younger people into baffling working practices they’ve never encountered before, to stoking fears older people (like me) might have about falling behind, to the personal angst and financial pressures of having to return to restrictive schedules or suffer the consequences.

If we can pull one positive out of that dreadful time, it’s that we proved we could work differently if we were motivated enough to do so.

Not only women-led, but predominately

The reason I keep coming back to the ‘women-led’ thing is because it’s predominately women whose lives would be positively affected if we were to invest in further developing some of the working practices and innovations we turned to in lockdown.  

And forgive me for being blunt, but – if you’re a typical guy, in a typical job, living a typical life – you’re not going to notice the negative impact of returning to the way things were all that much.

But the women in your life will.

When I talk about women-led SMEs, I’m talking about businesses and organisations that are run by or largely staffed by women who can clearly see where their work clashes with their life.

Currently, women juggle a lot of stuff. It would be nice if maybe some of that stuff we have to juggle wasn’t also made of knives, or on fire, or both. It would be awesome if some of that stuff simply never needed juggling again. Or just needed juggling once a quarter and could be planned for well in advance.

Lockdown showed us we didn’t need to shoehorn absolutely everything into an 8-12 hour day where if something didn’t quite fit, it was somehow a moral failure. It showed us we could work around things. We could work remotely some or all of the time, have core hours, take time out for chores, school needs, caring responsibilities and other life tasks then do a bit more work and so on.

And (apart from those dickheads in government at the time and their grifting dingleberries, obviously) trust and mutual support was quite the fashion.

Plus all that, don’t forget, was on systems and processes that we’d cobbled together on the fly, in a time of collective absolute fear and uncertainty.

Why go backwards?

Most women can list 10 things off the top of our heads, about how work works, that could be positively and swiftly reimagined with not very much fuss or investment of time or funds, and probably the same amount or more that could be proactively redeveloped over a slightly longer period with a bit of thought and collaboration.

What if we took all of that knowledge and those ideas, and looked at how our workplaces function, and looked at how our lives could be improved, and just…. Got on with it?

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What do you think?

What’s one thing that you’d change about your working life, that would make the rest of your life run more smoothly?

What’s something – a task or errand etc. – you’d like to be able do ‘in work hours’ that would just save you a whole bunch of time or hassle and that you can’t do now?

If you had a magic wand (or a bucket of cash) what would you put in place at work – could be a process, gadget, giant brass bell that clangs whenever a meeting runs over, anything.