Why the future should be more female
Female entrepreneurs? In this climate? Outrageous!
Think again.
Welcome to the girl boss era, the newest flavour of the decade, the hashtag of the hour!
Ever wondered how we are doing with gender equality of female leadership in 2021?
Well, I took a look at the 6th Economic Census by The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, and given that only 13.6% of our country’s entrepreneurs were women (that’s approximately one female entrepreneur for every six male entrepreneurs), I’d say we’re not doing too hot.
What’s going on? We have the second largest workforce in the world, with half of them being women, yet, according to a IWWAGE report, in November, 2020, by LEAD at Krea University, we also have the 3rd largest gender gap for female entrepreneurship in the world, as well as a 23.8% Female Labour Force Participation Rate – one of the worst in the world.
Shouldn’t we be more motivated to do something about this? After all, there are so many long-term benefits to having more female representation in the workforce.
Even without looking at the numbers, from a population of nearly 1.4 billion, more women working and operating their own businesses logically creates more jobs, more work, and a desperately needed boost to an economy that has gone through back-to-back recessions.
It just makes sense, doesn’t it?
It’s not a zero sum game – more women running businesses is just rationally better for all of us. I can’t, and won’t, speak for the personal experiences of the boss queens that make their hustle in an ever competitive small business landscape. As someone who is neither a woman nor an entrepreneur, it’s not my place nor my area of expertise to do so, however I will just present easy-to-research facts and figures because, why not?
(We live in an age where national statistics are readily and freely available online, I literally cannot imagine an excuse for not self-educating)
Alright, so what are some of these institutional barriers faced by female entrepreneurs?
Well, let’s think like fledgling business owners.
Businesses need financing and, unless you descended from immense ancestral wealth, it’s unlikely that you’d be able to seed fund your own business and you’d very likely need a loan from the bank. Unfortunately, like the article, Female Inclusion for Women-Owned Micro, Small, & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in India by Roshika Singh (International Finance Corporation) and Pratibha Chhabra (World Bank Group) covers, women get their loan requests rejected at a rate of 19% compared to men at 8%.
Woah, what, why? That seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it? Typically, banks won’t give you a loan if you don’t have collateral, such as property, and historically, women have never been beneficiaries of inherited property, especially in our part of the world. In fact, according to the archaic inheritance laws in India, if you’re either a woman or non-binary, you’re plain locked out, since the laws in India haven’t caught up to the possibility of women being providers for their families.
With no property, no collateral, no loan, female entrepreneurs are left with no choice but to rely on personal savings. Like the piece by Urmi Ashok Badiyani, Gender Bias: India’s inheritance laws ‘assume’ men alone are providers of family, suggests, if we can gender neutralize these old-timey laws – we’re a step closer to making female-run businesses less risky in the eyes of banks.
So that’s it? Just sort out this loan issue and we can finally rise up to the 4th worst gender gap for female entrepreneurship in India?
Ah, no, shoot, we’re not quite done!
It’s just the tip of this sausage party, unfortunately, because women are held back by societal barriers like family expectations, lower confidence from support systems, child-rearing and house duties still often being left to them, and sexism within the industries, such as not taking female business owners seriously or a higher refusal rate of meetings.
If there’s still a part of you that’s still wondering why you should be invested in this, consider the fact that according to the article, Women entrepreneurs in India: What is holding them back? by Sabrina Korreck, senior fellow observer at ORF (Observer Research Foundation), a study suggests that closing this gender gap is estimated to improve the national GDP by a lower estimate of at least 16% (or 52 million crore rupees) that could go up to an estimate of 68%, according to another study.
So I’ll ask again – why aren’t we more motivated? This really does help everyone.
Even the government is doing everything they can to incentivize female entrepreneurs with schemes like the PMEGP (Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme) which offers women a 5% deposit of total capital, as opposed to the 10% for general categories – although like numerous of my sources reiterate, these are either shrouded in red tape or have poor visibility.
We live in this country, our lives are run by this economy and a healthier economy is a healthier ecosystem for us all. We all know this, of course we do, so why not do what we can to push for reform and erode these barriers that hold us back as a society?
More women in power is more jobs, more opportunities, more for us all. More equality. I think we can all agree with that.