Welcome to Women of Balls where I Katie Balls speak to today's Trailblazers.

Young female entrepreneurship is on the rise.

Two years ago, 17,500 businesses were found by women aged 16 to 25,

which is a staggering 22 times greater than in 2018.

Now, 20% of all businesses across the UK are all female led.

And they've got all the industries covered,

from neuroscience consultants to luxury hair and beauty products,

to ethical dairy farmers and spin class instructors.

Yet, when it comes to investment,

women consistently underperform their male counterparts.

Why? And should more be done to support female entrepreneurs.

Joining me now to shine a light on some of these issues is Annalise Dodds,

the Shadow Secretary of State for Women Inequalities and Chair of the Labour Party,

Joe Overton, the Managing Director for Customer Propositions and Strategy for Business Commercial Banking at Lloyd's Banking Group

and Eki Newton, the co-founder of Carma Cance, an office lunch delivery company and Karma Kitchen that provides commercial kitchen spaces to food businesses.

Welcome all. To begin, Joe, if I could just start with you, for those listening on the podcast,

how do we understand the benefits to the economy that we

get from entrepreneurs in the first place? So small businesses and entrepreneurs are absolutely

the lifeblood of our economy. There's just under six million businesses of that size in the UK.

And the amount of innovation that they drive is absolutely phenomenal. You can hear that from some

of the examples you just gave there, Katie, of some of the innovative industries that they're part of. And we know that whatever

industry that is, that it's a really important part of creating jobs within the UK and making

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