Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.thedatacity.com/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

​
What is available and how are founders identified?

The Data City’s platform has the ability to analyse the leaders and founders of a company. Leaders are active directors (officers) listed on companies house. A women led business is a business where there are more active women directors than men directors. We identify founders by looking at directors appointed within 2 years and 28 days of a company’s incorporation. We add a 28-day buffer to account for standard administrative reporting delays permitted under UK corporate law. Specifically, the Companies House “14+14” rule grants a company up to 14 days to update its internal register of People with Significant Control (PSC) following an appointment, and an additional 14 days to formally submit this information to the public register. Founders are specifically a person with significant control and they are still an active director at the company. A person of significant control is defined by Government. In short it means a person likely has voting rights, shares, or a controlling influence in a company. Companies are required to declare persons of significant control. It is possible to have information protected, however. How to use this data? A company can be only founded by women or men, or it can have mixed founders.
  • A women only founded company is one where all of the identified founders have female gendered titles.
  • A women (mixed) founded company is one where there is at least one women founder.
In some instances we are not able to identify founders, or identify the genders of founders.Firstly, we rely on persons of significant control from Companies House. Persons of significant control is legislation that was introduced in 2015 and our ability to identify founders before then is reduced. An example is included in appendex one. In addition, sometimes the true founders of a company are not listed as persons of significant control, because of their initial level of equity in a company not meeting the threshold for significant control. Lastly, we are not able to identify the gender of a founder (or leader) where they have used a unisex title.In both leader and founder data, gender is based on the declared titles of officers on Companies House. Data City does not use machine learning to estimate the gender.You should be careful when using this data to compare summary statistics between men and women founded businesses. We recommend you remove outliers from your analysis.

​
Where is the data?

​
ANALYSE

In ANALYSE, you can find gender data in the analysis summary box, as well as in the company details panel. In the company details panel, you will see gender data presented like below. image png Jan 17 2024 03 39 01 8301 PM This communicates the number of men, women, and mixed founded companies. It also communicates the number of companies where we identify likely founders, but we are not able to identify their gender. Why are there no known founders? We are able to identify founders in the vast majority of cases, but for older companies this is more and more tricky. This visualisation shows the number of companies where we are not able to identify founders: 5100. For more information on the coverage of this metric read the launch article.

​
EXPLORE

In EXPLORE, you can find gender data in the people tab of each company page. Data is displayed under the women led statistics header.

​
Filtering

In ANALYSE and EXPLORE you can filter to include only women or men founded, or mixed founded companies. You can also include only women led companies. These options are available under the company filter.
In November 2023 we wrote an article detailing definitions, coverage and drawbacks of this approach.

​
Appendex one: ANN SUMMERS LTD. (01034349)

As per Ann Summers’ website:
10th December 1971, the first Ann Summers shop opened in Marble Arch. Their Executive Chair, Jacqueline Gold, joins her dad’s business as an intern with a brilliant idea - Tupperware parties, but for Ann Summers Product. The Ann Summers party is born.
On Companies House, their incorporation date is 10 December 1971. However, on Companies House, their earliest officer (director) is David Gold who was appointed “before 1991”:
image png Sep 17 2025 12 28 42 9112 PMThere are two issues here for founder analysis using Companies House data:
  1. We do not know the exact year David was appointed as a director.
  2. The incorporation date is 20 years before the director appointment date.
So although it’s quite clear from the website, it’s unclear using the data hence why we are unable to identify any founders regardless of gender: image png Sep 17 2025 12 31 07 2622 PM