Women’s Enterprise Day is here again. Around the country women will be encouraged to “go for it” and start their own business. It appears to be working. For the first time more than 1m women in the UK work for themselves and the numbers of self-employed women are slowly growing, against a broader trend of male stagnation and decline in enterprise.

Scratch the surface, though, and you can start to feel uneasy. The growth in new businesses owned by women is not being sustained. There is strong evidence that women’s businesses are not surviving as long as those of their male counterparts and not making it through to the next level. There are brilliant success stories but also tales of human misery and dashed dreams.