While scrolling through social media, a video appeared on my feed titled “Remember who you are, start-up boy”, followed by a montage of clips of young Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. For many of us, when thinking about start-ups, the ‘Tech bros’ image comes to mind. Perhaps images of drop-out Ivy League students in hoodies pouring over code or clips from The Social Network flood in.
Growing up in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Apple and Google, I realised quickly that start-up culture was too often associated with the image of ‘Tech bros’. Exactly like the video on social media that I came across, not one of them represented 51% of the world’s population: women.
Oxford is the beating heart of the UK’s innovation ecosystem, constantly spinning out new technologies. The UK’s start-up hub is only set to grow after Chancellor Rachael Reeves announced plans to bridge Oxford with Cambridge, investing in infrastructure and transport links to become “Europe’s Silicon Valley”. Conversations on venture capital, angel investors, and seed rounds are easily heard across the city, especially at inaugural events this year, such as OxBio’26 Summit and Ox Tech Week, which brought founders, investors, and researchers together. Yet in the midst of Oxford’s entrepreneurial excitement, an important question remains: who gets to build the future? Will Oxford reproduce the same founder stereotypes that Silicon Valley is known for?
In 2026, especially in Oxford, the stereotypical Tech bro culture represents a dated and misrepresented view of the start-up space. The media’s narrative on ‘Tech Bros’ is far from reality; however, it will surely discourage young girls from pursuing this industry. The Tech bro label is simplistic and cliché, and whilst it has been used as slang to group many successful founders together, it can create division rather than inclusion. For example, such culture can be reflected in recruitment processes: Klout app recruited programmers with a hiring message: “Want to bro down and crush some code? Klout is hiring”. Such language only ultimately reinforces stereotypes about who really belongs in this field.
Research shows that for female founders, the gender gap is not merely about salary, but equity and venture capital funding. A report by Parliament’s Women and Equalities Select Committee found that only 2% of venture capital was going to female-led businesses, further highlighting just exactly how significantly under-resourced female entrepreneurs truly are.
Additionally, analysis by The Alan Turing Institute Women in Data Science and AI team has shown that on average, female-founded AI start-ups secured six times less capital per deal than their male counterparts. The report showed that only 5% of VC firms that participated in funding deals had equal or majority representation of women making the decisions, highlighting gender inequality in venture capital funding. With the acceleration of AI tech companies, however, diversifying the start-up ecosystem is all the more essential to ensure services and products are created for everyone in society.
In 2019, The Rose Review estimated that if we worked to close the founder gender gap in the UK, and women found and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, this alone could add £250 billion (equivalent to 310 billion today with inflation) to the economy. In response to these findings, in 2019, the UK government backed Investing in the newly-launched Women Code (IWC) initiative, allowing finance providers to voluntarily collect and publish data on funding provided to women, leading to 290 signatories. In the Women and Equalities Committee’s “Female Entrepreneurship” report (October 2025), the committee advocated that whilst IWC has helped with funding due to its voluntary nature, IWC had limitations in reach and scope. The Committee advocates a state-backed national program of support to unlock the projected returns of female founders. It proposes that all investors supported by the British Business Bank sign the IWC and provide data on the proportion of finance provided to female-led businesses, and to set funding targets for women-led businesses, in order for UK equity finance to female entrepreneurs to increase from 2% to 10% by 2030.
Diversity is essential for driving innovation. For start-ups, where identifying new, unique ideas is required, a varied range of perspectives is advantageous. Diverse founding teams are essential to understand different consumer needs. With the recognition of women in Tech, the climate is changing. Take, for example, the Flybridge and XFactor Ventures “100 women in AI” campaign. However, whilst we can acknowledge that the founder gender gap is narrowing with the introduction of Government-backed initiatives, there is still a long road ahead. If the start-up space continues to be framed as male-led we risk discouraging the very diversity that drives innovation and resilience. The narrative needs to change. More than ever, it is important to ask: who gets to build the future?
