How to Overcome the Top 3 Barriers Faced by Women in Entrepreneurship
Being an entrepreneur is hard. Being a woman entrepreneur is, often, even more difficult. According to the World Economic Forum, “Despite all the blood, sweat and tears that get poured into a start-up by its founder, statistics indicate that female entrepreneurs still start their companies with 50% percent less capital than their male counterparts.” In addition, women face significant challenges in embodied leadership and access to networks and capital. These barriers inhibit success in women’s entrepreneurial ventures and weaken the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole. The JumpScale team is committed to doing our part to change these circumstances and has identified three critical areas to improve to make entrepreneurship more accessible to all.
Make space for intuitive leadership
Workplaces and board structures value analytical, quantitative, and unemotional decision-making. This is a highly narrow lens through which to process information which leads to a shortage of diversity and problem-solving skills and, ultimately, impedes an entrepreneur’s ability to bring innovative solutions to the marketplace. Women, in particular, are harmed by this pervasive expectation. They cannot make leadership decisions from a balanced perspective that places equal value on traditional analytics and a leader’s intuition. In 2019, Forbes reported on the concrete benefits of intuitive leadership, writing “without tapping into your intuition, you may have all of the right data, with the right kinds of input, but you won’t have a gut sense of whether or not something is ‘right.’” If women can embody wholistic decision-making practices, with equal weight placed on data and intuition-based decision-making, profound economic and social transformation is possible.
Increase ecosystem connectivity
Entrepreneurship is often lonely, and entrepreneurs often rely on mentors and peer networks to find support and avoid burnout. However, it is much harder for women to find success in the strategic networking required to find mentorship and grow their enterprise. Our team recommends women seek out women-centered networking opportunities or support circles to mitigate some of these issues. An excellent place to find opportunities in your area is the Association of Women Business Centers WBC locator tool. Many online resources are available to help women strengthen their networking strategies, such as Harvard Business Review’s piece on The Secrets of Successful Female Networkers.
eliminate barriers to capital
Raising capital is significantly more difficult for women than men. In 2020, only 11% of seed funding (2.3% of total available Venture Capital) was awarded to female founders globally. Furthermore, a recent IFC study found that male-led startups, on average, increase the amount of equity they raise post-acceleration by 2.6 times more than female-led startups. Investors can address this by committing themselves and their organizations to identify, track, and promote investment opportunities through a gender lens. CNBC recently reported that some predict that gender-lens investments will drastically outperform their conventional counterparts. Women entrepreneurs can seek investment through organizations designed to address this investment gap, though there are still not enough investment funds focused on addressing this issue. Organizations on the cutting edge of bridging this gap include the WOCstar Fund, an early-stage investment fund focused on tech innovation by inclusive teams and women of color, and Native Women Lead, which offers funding and networking opportunities to Native American and Alaskan Native women. JumpScale interviewed Gayle Jennings-O’Byrne, Co-Founder of WOCstar Fund on The New Normal Podcast, available here.
Breaking down the barriers women entrepreneurs face will only bring more diversity of thought and innovative, new solutions to the marketplace. We believe that the women leading businesses today, especially those in social impact, are changing the world for the better. To learn more about how JumpScale supports women-led organizations, schedule a call with one of our team members.