To mark International Women’s Day, Gemma Casey, NatWest’s Ecosystem Manager for Wales, explains how a small idea to help women in Wales launch their own business grew into a movement empowering hundreds of women.

On International Women’s Day two years ago I was at the launch of a new event series designed to support women in business.

More than 120 attendees had gathered at a Cardiff hotel for the inaugural conference of It’s About Time – most of them mums running their own businesses, since this was the theme of that first event.

What started as an idea for a small-scale event to help mums in business network and access support had grown as the organisers – we at NatWest, along with  the University of South Wales, the Federation of Small Businesses and Darwin Gray Solicitors – recognised just how many women wanted to be involved.

From conversations with friends, colleagues, work contacts, and members of other networking groups, we recognised that, despite the myriad of business support out there, women in business were often feeling overlooked. For any number of reasons, they felt that the support on offer wasn’t relevant, available or applicable to them.

Also from those conversations came the name, It’s About Time. It quickly became apparent that many of the challenges women faced were down to time – the right time to start a business, the right time to grow a business, or literally not having enough time to do it all.

We also felt, of course, that it was about time that these issues – and more – were addressed.

Our first event coincided with the launch of the Rose Review, an HM Treasury-commissioned report co-authored by NatWest’s now CEO Alison Rose. This report looked at the barriers facing female entrepreneurs. It revealed that female-led businesses were underrepresented in high value sectors, and that £250 billion could be added to the economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate in the UK as men.

The report also shone a light on the issues we were hearing time and again from female business owners in Wales, including a feeling that there were insufficient suitable networking opportunities, and a lack of relatable role models.

So It’s About Time grew into a series of events and other content, including blogs, to try to plug some of these gaps and offer women in business in Wales more of the support they told us they needed. Among the subjects we’ve focused on is money, coming together for another conference to debate and discuss why it’s such an emotive subject and how we can work together to make the topic less of a challenge.

Just as we were due to gather our community together again for another conference, ironically enough looking at wellbeing, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. We now have plenty of evidence of the impact that the resulting lockdowns and other restrictions have had, and continue to have, on women in particular. And yes, of course a lot of that impact centres on time, as many women have been called on to juggle even more than they were doing before.

This year’s International Women’s Day has a theme of #ChooseToChallenge. In the light of our experiences of the past year, and knowing what we do about the barriers women in business were already facing before the pandemic, this feels both hugely appropriate and also even more pressing.

If out of adversity inevitably comes some opportunity, surely our opportunity now is to challenge the status quo and rebuild towards a more sustainable and equitable future.