Business schools seek a fair start for women in startups
This contribution goes to Ian Wylie who is a journalist and television presenter. Early in her career she was a writer and editor for The Guardian; she still writes occasional articles for that paper, along with the Financial Times, Monocle, CMI and others. She has been a European correspondent for Fast Company and has covered regular assignments for Management Today, Google Think Quarterly, World Economic Forum, Weapons of Reason, Times Higher Education, Brand Republic and others.
Masters in management prepare budding female entrepreneurs to overcome barriers and biases
In February, a report by the UK government’s Task Force on High-Growth Women-Led Businesses noted that “eight in ten young people cannot name a single female entrepreneur.” And, when they hear the word “businesswoman,” they are four times more likely to think of a man, the report added.
While women’s position is improving in many areas of business (for example, the proportion on boards worldwide rose 3.6 percent last year according to Deloitte, though it only reached 23.3 percent), progress in entrepreneurship is uneven. Women-led businesses receive less than 2 percent of venture capital funding in the U.K., according to the government-owned British Business Bank, for example.
But these obstacles and perceptions aren’t stopping Alvia Dibby Shadqah
A management master’s student from Indonesia who led her team to the finals of Imperial College Business School’s WE Innovate entrepreneurship challenge, where they came second.
Her company, Hi-Fond, provides an edible preservative coating for fruit that prevents moisture loss and ensures better quality produce reaches consumers with less waste.
“Building trust in a male-dominated business space can be intimidating,” she says. “At industry conferences and meetings, I’m often the only woman in the room and that’s been daunting.” But she adds that Imperial offers “incredibly inclusive” programs that “make female entrepreneurs feel safe to start expressing our ideas.”
Imperial’s Entrepreneurship Lab in London has supported more than 500 women over the past 10 years, offering female entrepreneurs a range of support services over a six-month programme, including workshops, access to prototyping spaces and facilities, networking events and one-to-one mentoring from experienced entrepreneurs, investors and industry experts. The WE Innovate Challenge, which includes eight university partners, awards more than £250,000 in equity-free grant funding.
“There is now more awareness and support for female entrepreneurship,” says Sarah Ranchev-Hale, director of the Lab.
“But the core challenges of gender bias and the need for more female role models and mentors remain. Women still encounter significant barriers when seeking investment, and often receive less funding than their male counterparts.”
Elina Cohen-Peirano, a graduate of the Master in Management (MiM) at Iéseg in France, recalls meeting an entrepreneur last year who was asked by investors if her husband would invest in her business.
The investors did not fund her business. “It’s not a question they would ask male entrepreneurs,” the student notes. “Confidence is an important factor for women aspiring to be entrepreneurs.”
At 24, Cohen-Peirano is on her third start-up. Urone is a social enterprise that works with business schools and universities to organize entrepreneurship classes, workshops and conferences for student entrepreneurs. A previous venture helped young immigrants integrate professionally and socially in northern France, while another developed and marketed an innovative horse-riding stirrup.
Balancing academic responsibilities and gender gaps
“Young female entrepreneurs who are also students not only need to strike a balance between academic responsibilities and their entrepreneurial path, but also fight gender gaps and inequalities while doing so,” says Cohen-Peirano.
“During my MiM, I had amazing professors, both women and men, who really opened my mind to what I could achieve,” she adds. “They had studied at Harvard, had created multiple companies, and had worked with governments, all while they were still young. That really broadened my sense of what was possible.”
At industry conferences and meetings, I am often the only woman in the room and that has been daunting
A challenge that affects all young entrepreneurs, regardless of gender, is overcoming youth and limited experience when trying to build credibility and connections, says Mathilde Janicot, a MiM graduate from HEC Paris.
She did just that and launched Revolty, a company that recycles electric vehicle batteries for use with solar panels.
“My MiM… gave me the confidence and ambition crucial to entrepreneurship,” she says. “Real-world challenges and initiatives became our classroom, like the HEC Startup Launchpad that allowed me to create Revolty.”
According to data from accreditation body AACSB, there has been a 6 percent increase in master’s programs in entrepreneurship over the past five years
According to academic director Anne-Sophie de Gabriac, now a third of students on the new Master in Business Management at French business school Essec, which starts this month, will be women.
“At the heart of the course is the notion that running a startup requires entrepreneurs to navigate many tensions and paradoxes,” she explains.
“Women entrepreneurs who don’t work in the tech sector, for example, often struggle if they don’t have a [chief technology officer] partner, so it’s important to train them in the [tech skills] that can help them test and bring their minimum viable product to market.”
The problems faced by women entrepreneurs go beyond stereotypes, finances or inspiration,
says Guy Champagne, director of entrepreneurship at Essca in France. “Often, challenges are associated with a lack of support from society – family, friends and social circles,” he notes.
Champagne says Essca’s goal is to attract women entrepreneurs with honorary loans and funds, pitch competitions, startup incubators and business incubators at its Bordeaux and Angers campuses, as well as networking groups and mentoring with alumnae.
One such alumna is Mathilde Lefrançois, who launched Farmitoo, an online store that allows farmers to buy equipment at fair and transparent prices, with delivery direct to their farms.
“In the agricultural industry, I noticed that many people were surprised to see a young Parisian female founder; she needed extra effort and the support of a mentor to prove it was possible,” she says.
“It is crucial to support, reassure and accompany women through various means, whether with mentors, incubators, investors, funds or training programmes.”
The signs are encouraging, says Jurek Sikorski, director of the Entrepreneurial Lab at Henley Business School, who says he has seen an increase in angel investors and venture capital firms funding women-led businesses.
“They still receive a disproportionately small share of private investment, but there is a growing recognition of gender bias within the startup sector, and that is leading to more initiatives promoting gender equality and diversity,” she says.
Barriers to female entrepreneurship
This post is by Tanya Arturi, who is helping pharma teams improve their omnichannel marketing skills. She is a digital strategist since 2000, an academic, author and speaker, a Forbes Coaching Council Fellow, CEO of Bold Freelancers and passionate about helping freelance women.
I help upskill pharma teams in omnichannel marketing. Digital strategist since 2000 | Academic, author and speaker | Forbes Coaching Council member. CEO of Bold Freelancers – passionate about helping freelance women.
On Tuesday last week, I was privileged to be invited by the Female Founders Forum to an event at the House of Lords to launch their latest report “Inspiring Innovation”.
The Female Founders Forum was set up by The Entrepreneurs Network in partnership with Barclays, to encourage, support and promote female entrepreneurship.
Initiatives like this are great for encouraging female entrepreneurship and make economic sense; After all, Alison Rose’s Female Entrepreneurship Report (2019) concluded that “…up to £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as UK men.”
The report focuses on the following sectors because the UK is in a strong position to be a global leader in all of these industries and inventions in these sectors will have a positive global impact:
– GreenTech
– Life Sciences
– FinTech
– E-commerce
– AI
The UK is home to some of the world’s best universities and attracts leading researchers due to the quality of its institutions.
On top of this, London receives a quarter of all venture capital (VC) funding in Europe and DeepMind, which is one of the most impressive AI companies in the world, was founded in the UK.
The British public is leading the way as an enthusiastic adopter of online shopping and digital payments in recent years and the UK is the first country to make a net zero commitment into law.
However, only 6% of women in the UK run their own businesses
This compares to 15% of women in Canada, 11% in the US and 9% in the Netherlands.
The report found 4 key barriers to female entrepreneurship in the above sectors:
- Access to finance
- Under-representation of female students in STEM subjects
- Unequal domestic and childcare responsibilities
- Limited access to networks and mentoring opportunities
These barriers are summarised in the report below:
- Access to equity finance
Women are less likely to take out loans or use their personal savings for their businesses, meaning they start their businesses with around half the capital as men. On top of this, equality funding is one of the most popular ways for high-growth companies to raise capital, but over the past five years, female-founded companies have only received around 15% of all equality funding.
One of the main issues is that VCs are more likely to invest in companies run by people like them – male investors are more likely to invest in male entrepreneurs and female investors are more likely to invest in female entrepreneurs.
As only 13% of senior decision-makers at VC firms are women, this base currently favours men. Almost half (48%) of companies have no women on their investment teams.
Recommendations: In 2019, Her Majesty’s Treasury launched an Investing in Women Code, a programme that shows a commitment to supporting the advancement of women entrepreneurs in the UK by improving their access to tools, resources and funding from the financial services sector.
Organisations that have not signed up to the code should be persuaded to join, to commit to investing in companies founded by women.
The other recommendation is for VC firms to commit to developing a pipeline of female talent, both at junior and senior levels.
At the junior level, firms should actively seek to recruit female university graduates and provide them with the training they need to become investors. Finally, data collected by the Investing in Women Code revealed that female entrepreneurs who already know their investors are twice as likely to receive funding, compared to those who approach them without knowing them. Therefore, VCs and angel investors should work with groups of female founders to bring them into their networks.
- Underrepresentation of female students in STEM disciplines
Many of the fastest growing companies are science and technology companies. However, Britain suffers from a marked drop-out rate of girls from STEM disciplines.
In their teens, 39% of girls study for a maths A-level, but by adulthood, the “leaky pipeline” means that only 17% of tech workers in the UK are women. Part of the problem is that there appears to be evidence that women leave STEM fields because they face less favourable working environments and that women in STEM face more discrimination than their counterparts in non-STEM fields.
This is problematic for female founders in specialist industry sectors because high-growth companies in areas such as life sciences and healthcare are disproportionately founded by people with masters and PhDs.
This is because innovative companies often need founders with highly technical knowledge. Therefore, by increasing the number of women working in STEM and receiving PhDs, we can increase the number of women starting businesses in high-growth sectors.
Recommendations: Every stage of the fleeting STEM pipeline needs attention to encourage women to advance their careers. This must start early.
Parents, teachers and the media should show girls female role models in STEM.
Universities should work with schools to encourage more girls to study STEM subjects at the undergraduate level. There is a key opportunity for the private sector to engage with schools and universities.
The majority of women (84%) say they were never introduced to AI or machine learning careers at their campus career fairs and 78% did not have the opportunity to do an AI or machine learning internship at university.
This means there is a good chance that companies will be the first to introduce young women to potential STEM and technology careers.
The private sector should seize this opportunity and become more involved in university career fairs, highlighting the career opportunities they can offer to female university students.
The other recommendation to help overcome this barrier is to retain women looking to re-enter the workforce after having children by teaching them to code
The government should support and initiate these types of initiatives, for example BT has a partnership with Code First Girls and Durham University runs an initiative called TechUp Women.
Both offer subsidised coding training for women and girls and aim to increase the number of women working in technology. Additionally, mentoring opportunities are important; the Women into Science and Engineering (WISE) campaign has a list of networks for women working in STEM and many of these focus on providing mentorship and role models for girls.
Women who have successful careers in STEM should try to inspire the next generation of inventors and innovators by signing up to these initiatives and supporting younger women.
- Inequality in household and childcare responsibilities
Women often face an unequal distribution of household responsibilities. Women do an average of 60% more unpaid work at home.
Only 10% of heterosexual married couples do an equal amount of housework, and in 77% of these families, the wife does more.
If we can achieve gender parity in our personal lives, this could provide women with additional time to invest in starting and scaling businesses and succeeding professionally.
Recommendations: Long-term societal change is needed for the government to equalise statutory shared parental pay (SSPP) and statutory maternity pay (SMP), because at the moment couples are better off if the mother takes most of the time off after the birth of a child.
In addition, childcare needs to be made more affordable. Britain has the most expensi
