Murray Edwards acts as just 4 per cent of Cambridge spin-outs are all-female led

This isn't just a Cambridge problem. Women are vastly underrepresented in spin-outs across the UK. But it's a problem Cambridge needs to sort.

So at Murray Edwards College we decided to do our bit to tackle the issue from the ground level up. We have this month launched Murray Edwards Enterprising Women, a series of programmes in entrepreneurship open to women students, researchers and recent alumnae from across the University.

Murray Edwards is a college for women. We believe that so long as there is inequality in society, there is an important role for women's organisations and institutions.

We also believe we should use the power of our unique identity to help women beyond our own gates. That's why we have opened the programmes to women from the whole university.

There are already quite a few entrepreneurship programmes at Cambridge but you just have to look at the pictures of most of them to see they tend to be male dominated.

What we couldn't be sure of was whether an entrepreneurship programme targeted specifically at women would generate interest from would-be female founders. We need not have worried.

As soon as we advertised our first programme She Starts, for women interested in entrepreneurship but who don't yet have a definite concept for a company, we were deluged by applications. In the end, 110 women applied for 60 places.

What happened next was also fascinating. In this first programme, participants had to divide into teams and develop ideas from scratch over a weekend.

They then pitched to judges from AstraZeneca and Hoare Banks' Golden Bottle Trust, who have funded the initiative alongside Santander senior executive Rafael Noya in a personal capacity. Cambridge Angels, who are one of several local organisations supporting us, also judged.

Our mentors and facilitators, led by Sana Capital's Hanadi Jabado, a Murray Edwards President's Fellow, were experienced in running such programmes but they noticed at once something different about what was happening at this one – the very high levels of collaboration in teams and lack of aggressive competitiveness.

Judges also noted that in the final pitching teams shared the spotlight with no one person trying to grab all the attention. It would be fascinating to do research into the extent to which would-be female founders behave differently.

The ideas were invented from scratch and we couldn't help noticing how they reflected women's interests but also a strong humanitarian concern. The winning teams were LooDown, an app to help women find the nearest good toilet; Respoken, an app to help stroke victims communicate; and SheRuns, an app to help women synchronise their fitness programmes with their menstrual cycle.

A further idea Afromics – an ambitious project to sequence African genomes to improve the efficacy of drugs – received a special mention from judges.

All four ideas won a fast track to interview for a ‘She Soars,’ the next leg of the initiative, aimed at teams led by women or with a significant percentage of women in the leadership who are ready to become founders. It will run weekly over six weeks.

Later programmes will be for women more advanced in their journey, including a programme in which we will introduce female founders who left Cambridge within the last five years to investors interested in investing in women-led companies. In the UK, only two per cent of VC money goes to women-led companies.

The University's own Cambridge Enterprise is supporting us and Vice-Chancellor Debbie Prentice is an enthusiastic cheerleader. Of course, a series of programmes targeted specifically at women is only one of the solutions to the underrepresentation of women in entrepreneurship. But it is an important addition to the Cambridge entrepreneurship ecology.

Of those who took part last weekend, almost all said the programme had encouraged them to consider being a female founder one day. These are some of the most academically brilliant young women in the country, most studying for PhDs in subjects of great relevance to setting up a company one day.

I felt watching them that in five, 10, 15 years time, some of them at least will be featured in the business media. Watch this space.

To engage with the College and its initiatives, designed to level up a playing field on which a gender mis-match is currently played out far too often, contact Lisa Brent at enterprisingwomen@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk.