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More than a third of the UK’ s fastest-growing technology start-ups have no board-level female representation than a third( 36 %) of these companies have no board-level female representation at all.
The findings highlight a disconnect between how companies within the UK’ s fast-growing tech ecosystem think about diversity, and how they put this into practice. These findings are taken from Think & Grow’ s latest report, Breaking and Remaking the Next Generation of High-impact Boards.
UK scale-ups are failing to adequately prioritise board-level gender diversity, according to a new study from global growth consultancy, Think & Grow.
The research shows that while 94 % of UK board members believe that it is essential to have a diverse mix of people on a company board, women hold just 18 % of board roles across the UK’ s fastest growing technology scale-ups. Additionally, more
Board-level gender diversity at UK scale-ups and start-ups is significantly lower than at listed technology firms – women make up 41 % of all board directors across FTSE 350 tech companies, more than double the level seen inside early-stage businesses. Larger listed organisations must adhere to FCA diversity and inclusion rules that require a minimum of 40 % female representation on boards. This points to an ecosystem where government or agency initiatives or recommendations play an important role in supporting diversity and highlights the need for scale-ups to be more proactive in boosting diversity.
Women also hold few senior leadership positions on the boards of the UK’ s fastest-growing technology scale-ups; just 12 % of the UK’ s fastest-growing technology companies have a female CEO, founder or co-founder, and the same proportion have a female chair.
Sage announces Finance Intelligence Agent to power high-performance finance teams
Sage, a leader in accounting, financial, HR and payroll technology for small- and mid-sized businesses, has introduced the Sage Intacct Finance Intelligence Agent. The agent is part of Sage’ s growing network of AI agents transforming the role of the CFO, from supporting the business to leading it.
This launch sets a new benchmark for high-performance finance and marks a pivotal step toward autonomous operations and insights. By supporting CFOs with AI-powered agents, Sage helps organisations get continuous accounting, trust and insights, delivering speed, accuracy and clarity, while reducing manual efforts and reporting.
Historically, finance teams often needed to hunt for reports, review dashboards and sometimes export and manipulate data in spreadsheets to get answers and make recommendations – a process that could take minutes to hours depending on the complexity of the task. The Finance Intelligence Agent represents the next evolution of AI in finance, acting as an intelligence layer that routes natural language questions to the right AI agents and financial data sources, co-ordinates their responses and composes a final, actionable answer – in seconds. By eliminating the need to run reports or analyse data externally, it simplifies decision-making and accelerates outcomes.
“ It’ s incredibly important that we give finance teams technology that doesn’ t just respond to requests but works alongside them proactively, and that’ s what we are achieving with our agents,” said Steve Hare, CEO, Sage.
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