Appealing to women can prove pivotal to future growth

Women control around $32tn of worldwide spending, a recent study shows, and appealing to them has been pivotal for a number of companies in this year’s ranking of Europe’s Long-term Growth Champions.

The companies’ focus on women could also be a smart bet on the future, according to the research from NielsenIQ, a market research company. It estimates that up to 80 per cent of consumer spending is already influenced by women, but forecasts that women will actually control 75 per cent of discretionary spending in the next few years.

“Companies [that want to grow] should be focusing more on influencing women because they are the ones spending the money. There’s also a lot of social and economic impact tied together when you focus on women,” says Yulia Stark, president of the European Women’s Association, a global network focused on empowering women in business.

Women reinvest more of the money they earn into the economy than men, she says, with key spending areas being children, household and care.

For Gousto, the UK recipe box business, which is ranked fourth in this year’s listing, women have been integral to its success, says chief strategy officer Sally Matthews. Gousto’s customer base skews heavily towards women, who are often busy working mothers.

“The key is they want to feed their families without the mental load of meal planning . . . when they’re already doing a significant share of the everyday mental load,” she says.

Matthews has been at the company since it was “a scrappy start-up”. She says the recipe development team, which was all-female at the beginning, had to work around many constraints to produce recipes that could be re-created at home with a finite number of ingredients.

A former senior data scientist for the company, Irene Carretero, built the menu recommendation algorithm that helps customers choose recipes, while Anna Greene, vice-president of marketing, was “instrumental in building Gousto into a household brand”.

Matthews herself, as head of strategy, plays a major role in deciding where the company focuses its efforts — for example, its recent launch in Ireland.

Elevating women has been part of Gousto’s long-term strategy. In 2016, the company identified actions to “move the needle on equality” within the organisation. Almost a decade later, more than half of Gousto’s board is female and half of promotions over the past four years have gone to women, says Matthews.

Diverse boards have been linked to better financial performance. Despite this, not all European countries are moving at the same pace when it comes to embracing women in director roles.

The EU’s Women on Boards Directive, adopted in 2022, set a series of targets. By June 2026, the under-represented sex (usually women) should make up 40 per cent of non-executive directors or 33 per cent of all directors, or the company must be able to demonstrate that its selection process is fair.

The directive was a milestone that took a decade to negotiate, says Carlien Scheele, director of the European Institute for Gender Equality, but three years on, she says there has been “a striking difference” in how countries have responded. Only 14 member states are transposing the directive into national law so far.

The institute’s data shows that in 2024 in the nine member states with binding quotas, women made up 40.1 per cent of board members in its survey of the largest listed companies. Meanwhile, in countries that had taken no action, it stood at 17.8 per cent.

Companies should be focusing more on influencing women because they are the ones spending the money

-Yulia Stark, president of the European Women’s Association

Victoria McKenzie-Gould, corporate affairs director at Marks and Spencer, the FTSE 100 company with the most women in senior leadership positions, points to diverse teams driving performance, rather than the impact of one gender specifically.

It is more about bringing in “real diverse thought, bringing people in with different experiences” than just gender, she says.

“No one wants to be anywhere because of a characteristic they have, everyone wants to be there because they’re the best person for the job,” she adds.

Kinga Stanislawska, co-founder and president of venture capital networking group European Women in VC, thinks it is also important to acknowledge that women focusing on “the operational things that allow a company to scale” are not always in the most visible roles.

Stanislawska cites BioNTech, most well known for its Covid-19 vaccine, as one of the best examples where women have been crucial to a company’s long-term growth.

Co-founder Özlem Türeci told a World Health Organization briefing in 2021 that the company’s gender-balanced workforce was “critical for making the seemingly impossible possible” — developing a vaccine in 11 months.

The impact of a heavily female workforce is also clear at Inmunotek, a Spanish pharmaceutical company, which appears in this year’s ranking, where women make up 80 per cent of the workforce, according to chief executive and president Jose Luis Subiza.

Subiza says women have been “foundational” to shaping product design and clinical trials, with their experiences influencing what the company prioritises.

One of its newest products is a vaccine for urinary tract infections.

“We decided to go into developing a UTI vaccine because it’s a big problem for women and because fighting UTIs will be even more important in future because of antibiotic resistance,” says Subiza.

The next decade could be a decisive moment for women as a huge transfer of wealth occurs.

In Germany, family businesses are a bedrock of the economy but currently just 12 per cent of family businesses are handed over to daughters as successors, says Christina Diem-Puello, president of VdU, which represents women entrepreneurs in Germany.

“The next decade will see a massive wave of succession in family businesses — over 1,000 businesses,” she says.

“There’s big potential in handing over more companies to daughters.”

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