Giving to UK women in trade so the country can gain: Signals from the ITC SheTrades Outlook 

As trade becomes a central lever for economic growth, it doesn’t just expand markets: it reshapes who gains access to global value chains, and on what terms. Yet, access to those networks is rarely neutral. 

Gender inclusion is now routinely acknowledged in trade discourse; the more pressing issue is whether it is embedded in the systems that shape how businesses operate. The real test now is whether those commitments leave a paper trail both in policy and in practice, and not just in good intentions.

Trade Finance Global (TFG) heard from Pamela Coke-Hamilton, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre (ITC). “It’s one thing to know that women’s role in trade matters; it’s another to build ecosystems that work for them,” she said.

Published in 2025 and described by the International Trade Centre (ITC) as a ‘first-of-its-kind’, the SheTrades Outlook Report does not ask whether inclusion simply appears in policy blueprints. Rather, it invites a more probing question: does gender equality withstand integration into the hard-wiring of trade governance, or does it dissipate once policy collides with market reality? 

“As we mark a decade of our flagship SheTrades Initiative, we at ITC remain committed to making trade a force for shared prosperity for all, in the UK and to all the countries we serve, worldwide,” said Coke-Hamilton. Rolled out in more than 65 countries, including in the UK, the scheme comes at a time “when evidence-based policymaking is more important than ever. 

Backed by the UK through the SheTrades Commonwealth+ Programme, it benchmarks countries across 55 indicators spanning six policy areas – with a range of 0-1 – to determine the extent gender is integrated into trade networks. 

Clearly, women’s economic empowerment has shifted from the language of equality to that of competitiveness. The UK has aligned itself with this shift, positioning itself as a leading advocate and champion of gender-responsive trade as part of its wider economic agenda. 

However, it’s important to note that having supported the development of the SheTrades Outlook framework and subsequently adopting it in 2023, the UK is, in effect, measuring its performance against standards it helped formulate. Against this backdrop, the pattern of results may take on an added meaning. 

Legal certainty, uneven market access 

The first step is understanding the hurdles women entrepreneurs face – especially hidden hurdles – by gathering data to test assumptions about how policies affect them, from the barriers to accessing markets, including public procurement markets, to the realities of accessing finance,” said Coke-Hamilton. “This data is key because you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

The findings reveal that the UK  performs strongest where equality is codified in formal regulation, and less consistently where participation depends on access to skills and capital. 

With a score of 0.95 – the highest across all six pillars – its Legal and Regulatory Framework reflects a system dense with statutory guarantees: equal remuneration, protections against workplace discrimination and ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and key International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions. 

In this domain, gender equality operates primarily at the level of law, reinforced by measures that support labour market continuity, such as Scotland’s provision of up to 1,140 hours of funded childcare annually.

Yet the architecture of the data tells its own story: 50% of the indicators in this category draw on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project. 

What is being captured, then, is not equality in its lived or material sense, but a narrower conception rooted in legal compliance alone. But on that terrain, one must admit, the UK performs exceptionally well. 

If the British legal system has a clear strength, its trade policy presents a more complicated picture. 

With a score of 0.70, evidence suggests gender equality appears to be more procedural than substantively embedded within trade policy design. 

Since 2023, the UK has signed three new agreements – accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the UK-Ukraine digital trade agreement and the 2025 UK-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) – all of which contain various gender provisions. 

While this marks a visible evolution in drafting practice, 18 of the 36 evaluated trade agreements are classified as demonstrating only an ‘evolving’ approach to gender responsiveness, suggesting integration remains uneven. 

Nonetheless, the UK has initiated ‘ex-ante impact assessments on all newly negotiated FTAs signed post-Brexit, examining the impacts on all protected groups, including gender, followed by ex-post evaluations 5-10 years after implementation’, demonstrating a willingness to monitor inconsistency and rectify provisions. 

Government communications also frame gender equality as a growing priority within the UK, highlighting gender-dedicated chapters within other recent partnerships with Japan, the European Economic Area (EEA), and Australia and New Zealand. 

Beyond its more formal foundations, the UK maintains a steady performance across most of the remaining pillars. 

As Business Environment and Work and Society achieve 0.70 and 0.76 respectively, the attention moves from formal guarantees to how gender plays out in everyday working life – pointing to a system that is attempting to support gendered participation rather than merely declaring equality. 

The first domain focuses primarily on support rather than direct redistribution. In practice, this means it is built less on traditional quotas and more on its infrastructure. Examples of this are the multitude of schemes put forth by the Department for Business and Trade (DTB), which offer export and targeted entrepreneurship advice. 

Public procurement is also leveraged as an inclusion tool: under the Social Value Model, at least 10% of a contract’s evaluation score is tied to social criteria, often including workforce equality. 

Conversely, the Work and Society dimension reveals the limits of institutionalised equality. Women face no legal barriers to entering industries or occupations, yet the data show that as recently as March 2024, women spent on average 64 minutes more per day than men on unpaid domestic and care work. 

So, even within a system that seemingly provides strong support, time remains unevenly distributed.

The result is a structural tension across both domains: formal access to markets and institutions does not automatically offset the unpaid labour that underpins women’s participation. Equality may be written into policy and supported by infrastructure, but the burden of care continues to shape who can fully capitalise on those opportunities. 

Finally, Access to Finance represents the UK’s most significant weakness; and capacity building is under pressure.

Access to Skills records 0.62 out of 1, a noticeable drop from the higher-performing pillars, while Access to Finance falls further to 0.45, marking the weakest performance within the report by far. 

On skills, it must be said that the UK has invested heavily in its workforce development for women. National programmes such as free Skills for Life bootcamps and the National Careers Service aim to widen technical and digital participation through databases of online learning. Although it is worth noting that the majority of these schemes are broad-based and, even though the training ecosystem is expanding, its redistributive impact is harder to quantify. 

And, skills may build confidence, but finance ultimately determines whether ambition becomes genuine development. 

Entrepreneurial support for this pillar includes the Help to Grow leadership training and mentoring courses, which are delivered with 90% government funding. Within the innovation space, the proportion of successful women-led applications has risen from one in seven to one in three. 

But, sadly, the issue is not simply whether funding exists, but who receives it. Venture and growth-stage finance remain unevenly distributed, and the lack of consistent gender-disaggregated data obscures where barriers persist. 

It is here that inclusion becomes most tangible, and evidently, most fragile. 

What this means for UK trade 

The architecture for gender-responsive trade is clearly in place. The next step is ensuring that gender considerations influence the core mechanics of trade agreements and implementation, rather than remaining a mere superficial feature of policy design, with the risk falling into both legal and economic stagnation. 

This is especially true when the UK chose to measure itself against criteria it helped develop through the SheOutlook assessment. And while that decision strengthens ownership, it also raises the stakes, making the credibility of the country’s leadership reliant on the genuine implementation of gender in trade.

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As it goes forward, the report holds several key recommendations for the UK to consider: 

1. Integrate trade explicitly into the UK Women, Peace and Security National Action Plan 2023-2027; 
2. Require gender-disaggregated data across finance and public procurement systems; 
3. Broaden access to venture capital and export finance for women-led firms; 
4. Complete the rollout of the single-window customs system to ease administrative burdens on SMEs; 
5. Establish a clear, consistent definition of women-owned businesses to prevent fragmentation; 
6. Integrate women’s business associations into trade negotiations as a matter of structure, not consultation-by-exception; 
7. Introduce targeted gender-sensitivity training for customs and border officials.

“We need data to pinpoint areas of intervention, and to ensure policies translate into opportunities for women entrepreneurs in practice. That’s the role of ITC SheTrades Outlook. It offers data-backed evidence to guide governments in designing and implementing reforms that tangibly support women in trade,” said Coke-Hamilton.