A new survey by London-headquartered wealth manager Bowmore Wealth Group shows that male entrepreneurs in the UK still generate three times as much from selling their businesses.

Female entrepreneurs in the UK made £8.2 billion ($11 billion) from selling their businesses last year, compared with £25.3 billion by their male counterparts, according to new data obtained by Bowmore Wealth Group.

The money made by female entrepreneurs exiting their businesses is 24 per cent of the total value of UK business sales, the firm said in a statement. The sale of male-owned businesses generated £25.3 billion over the same period – three times as much – based on HMRC data on sale proceeds from exits.

Bowmore said that the disparity suggests that female entrepreneurs face greater barriers to accessing venture capital and private equity backing than men.

That disparity might extend through the availability of debt finance. For example, only 40 per cent of the British Business Bank’s startup loans were lent to women-led businesses, despite the bank’s ambitions to narrow the funding gap.

One example is Kate Prince, who managed to receive £7 million in funding for her wellness brand, Ancient + Brave, but stressed that too many women are locked out of such capital funding. Research from the Investment in Women Taskforce found that only 1.8 per cent of equity investment in the UK went to female-founded businesses last year.

“It’s positive to see so many female entrepreneurs now building and selling high-quality companies. However, many female entrepreneurs report that the playing field is still not level,” Gill Millen, managing director of Bowmore Financial Planning, said. “The situation is improving, but not quickly, even when there is a concerted effort from organisations to improve the funding gap. The reality is too many brilliant female founders are shut out of growth capital and that’s a barrier to growth for the whole UK economy.”

Millen said that even when female entrepreneurs successfully exit their businesses, they still face a subtle bias such as in their ability to gain non-executive positions at companies or even in the advice they receive on reinvesting the money they make from exiting their business.

How they invest that money is very important as many entrepreneurs underinvest in their pensions with the aim of funding their retirement out of the sales proceeds of their business.

“One of the key challenges facing successful entrepreneurs – male and female – is how to sensibly reinvest the proceeds from a business sale to provide for their retirement,” Millen added. “However, research suggests that women are less likely to seek advice on investments than men, partly because there is a far lower number of female financial advisors than male.”

“If female entrepreneurs are not getting the right levels of financial advice and are not being advised on the right, tax-efficient investment strategies then that is really going to impact the quality of their life once they sell their businesses,” Millen said.