LAST week we celebrated International Women’s Day, when the achievements of women and challenges around the world were highlighted.

It was also national pie week.

The two aren’t linked, but they both have the potential to get me quite excited.

Pastry aside, the focus at the moment has leaned heavily towards the former, with the launch of the Chamber’s new campaign to promote women in business.

It also aims to ask businesses to challenge their unconscious, or indeed conscious, gender bias.

What do we mean by that?

Years ago, I attended a lunch for women in business where the guest speaker was a man (event organisers hadn’t really seen the light in those days).

The speaker stood up in front of around 300 businesswomen and told us that he “saw so many of the fairer sex with briefcases on trains these days” and “it’s a jolly good thing, job done in terms of gender equality."

The thing which stopped him being seriously hurt by 300 stale bread rolls (presumably baked in the same century as his attitude) pitched in his direction was, firstly, that we were hungry.

Secondly, we knew what he was trying to say, he meant well, but was clearly oblivious to the attitude he was projecting.

That unconscious bias still exists.

These days, the bias is hopefully more subtle but it rarely gets scrutiny to allow change to happen.

At the Chamber, we have been working on this and have launched a toolkit to really challenge businesses, particularly those who provide business support, to look at where they may be unconsciously discouraging women coming forward.

A couple of statistics illustrate this.

Firstly, only nine per cent of business start-up funding in the UK last year went to businesses with a female founder and, secondly, investments in companies with a female board member averaged £500,000 per deal from 2011 to 2015, compared with an average of £2.9m for those with no women on the board.

There are many reasons for the disparity, but the elephant in the room is unconscious bias.

Companies can have all the equality policies they can polish.

However, it is the intangibles that really matter.

Like doing more to encourage applications, ensuring females appear on PR and marketing material and providing support on confidence building, strategy and finance.

So, if you would like to have a look at our toolkit and challenge your organisation, you can access it at neechamber.co.uk/business-support-for-women

If it saves someone from a flying bread roll it will be worth it.

Rachel Anderson is head of policy and representation at the North-East England Chamber of Commerce