'Success is the best revenge' say female entrepreneurs in their 50s

At 46, Andrea Cooper is the oldest candidate on the latest series of The Apprentice. But the self-employed lettings agent - who also qualified as a midwife when she was 40 - says age is an asset when starting your own business.

She is one of a group of women defying the stereotype of Gen Z start-up entrepreneurs chasing the dream of working for themselves.

"I've got a wealth of life experience," says Cooper, who is more than a decade older than her fellow contestants.

"You develop all those personal skills as you get older, there are things a younger person might get really upset about, but I just think, 'actually nobody's died'.

"We can resolve it."

Cooper, a mother of five from Barnsley, says she built up her business later in life by "putting the work in" and having a solid knowledge of her product.

A survey by small business support organisation Enterprise Nation suggested Yorkshire and the Humber boasted the "strongest entrepreneurial intent".

It found 45% of those surveyed said they planned to start a business in the coming year and 41% of female founders in the region were aged between 45 and 55.

Ruth Sparkes, a 56-year-old tech entrepreneur, said she was spurred on after having AI "mansplained" to her by a younger man - on the same day she had built a chat bot for an app.

Sparkes created an app to enable sexual harassment to be reported in the workplace or in educational settings.

The former IT teacher, from Laughton en le Morthen near Rotherham, says she came up with the idea after discovering that girls in the college where she worked did not feel safe in communal areas.

"I got to this level of anger and was thinking, what can I do with my skill set? What can I do about it?" she says.

"Lots of people can build apps. You haven't got to be a brain surgeon to do that, so that's what I did.

"I taught myself how and the first thing I did was build a chat bot for the app."

Asked if she has experienced any obstacles in the tech sector due to her age and being a woman, she says: "The day I built the bot was the same day I was effectively dismissed by a much younger man, trying to teach me about what a chat bot was.

"It made me so angry."

Sparkes, who has an adult son, also says she fears her age counts against her when she applies for funding.

"It's like, hey, I'm a woman on the wrong side of 50 and I've got white hair so just put me on the scrap heap."

But Sparkes, who also runs a PR firm, has built two other apps and is working on another - involving knitting patterns - and says she has been approached by a business to build one for them.

"Who thinks they're going to be doing that in their mid 50s? But my brain doesn't work in the same way as it used to," she says.

Linda Harrison says being made redundant at the age of 50 was one of the main motivations for starting her own business.

"I want to be in control," she says.

"Being made redundant was really scary, and I don't ever want to be in that position again, where I've given all my control over to somebody else."

Formerly a communications writer, Harrison now runs her own PR and marketing firm and says she mostly works with women like herself - small business owners in Yorkshire.

The 52-year-old from York says being self employed comes with challenges - such as no sick pay - but also perks.

"I have the freedom to do the school run every day," she says.

Victoria Ward, who runs children's pamper parties in Selby, North Yorkshire, says age also brings experience of the mistakes business owners may make.

The 51-year-old says she suffered a lot of "pitfalls" in her 20s and 30s, such as "getting into debt and growing too fast, definitely".

"Back then as well, we didn't have social media, so it was quite hard in some respects to get your business out there," she adds.

Ward is about to launch a new business but says people have told her she is too old.

"I'm grateful for getting older. And my success has proven them wrong - that's the best revenge."

Vikki Coffey, from Hull, agrees that being an older female entrepreneur is a positive, rather than a disadvantage.

Coffey has formerly worked as a petrol station manager, driving instructor and pub landlady - but turned to selling art on ocean liners at the age of 40 before starting her own cruise holiday travel agency.

"If something goes wrong, I don't go into panic mode anymore, I don't stress like I used to," she says.

"After all the things I have seen - including an armed robbery at one of my petrol stations - it takes a lot to ruffle me now.

"I am in control of my own destiny."

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