Women play an essential role in management. They prove to be exceedingly talented, confident, educated, ambitious and career-oriented. This helps them to juggle the tasks, manage all the chores and strike a fine balance between professional and personal life. They have great foresight, patience and also negotiating and budgeting skills.
Today, when businesses are facing a severe talent crunch in the innovation domain, if women don’t play a meaningful role in business, then half of the country’s potential talent pool will remain under-utilized. Women entrepreneurs are those women, who initiate, organize and co-operate a business enterprise. Many interesting new ventures and startups also have women founders and are going places. As gender diversity becomes a talking point in corporate circles, it is heartening to see that there are positive strides being made.
The Harsh Truth and Current Scenario
Any debate on the status of women in India, sooner or later, tends to summon up pictures of discrimination, illiteracy, exploitation and low life expectancy. Although this is still true for many Indian women for whom their survival and family responsibilities are the driving forces for entrepreneurial activities, there’s another reality which is driving a new paradigm, and that is of a thriving nation powered by female business leaders.
Though the shifting role of women in business is being progressively acknowledged, the journey is still uptight with vast challenges. The woman entrepreneur faces lots of difficulties when it comes to embarking upon her own entrepreneurial venture. Majority of women entrepreneurs suffer from insufficiency of resources and therefore encounter great hardships in the chase of desired growth objectives.
There is an immediate need for policy makers, institutions and social organizations to take an inclusive and empathetic assessment about the social and psychological factors that distress the success rate of business women. There is a need to provide special training to women entrepreneurs for harnessing their creative energies into successful entrepreneurial ventures.
Breaking the Gender-Bias
Entrepreneurship is no longer principally considered a man’s domain. When it comes to keeping-up the pace with their male counterparts, women are leaving their marks in the business world and taking it by storm. Today, women entrepreneurs epitomize a group of women who have gone off the beaten track to explore new avenues of economic participation. For women, the contributing reasons to run organized enterprises more successfully are their skills and knowledge, their talents, abilities and creativity in business and an enthralling desire of wanting to do something on their own.
Over the last few years, there has been a substantial growth in female entrepreneurs who are becoming progressively successful in the professional and public sphere. It is quite evident that women entrepreneurs are gradually acquiring the required confidence, managerial and leadership skills for succeeding in business. There are hundreds of inspirational Stories of entrepreneurial women around the world on the internet, who are building great companies, breaking through barriers and cultivating economic and social good.
Statistics Speaks
Women entrepreneurs are prepared to face upcoming risks, 66% are willing to take above average or substantial risks for business investments. In the U.S. and Asia, female entrepreneurs are seen as being more innovative than their male counterparts. The GEM report states that 36% of female entrepreneurs come-up with dynamic products or services in the U.S., while only 33% of male entrepreneurs are able to do the same. For the record, the GEM defines innovative as “offering products that are new to some or all customers”. In Asia, 23% of these entrepreneurs make innovative products, compared with 22% of male peers.
According to another study by the International Finance Corporation, more than one third of global firms are owned by women leaders. A report by Dow Jones states that, the successful venture-backed businesses in the U.S. had twice the number of women among the founders. But perhaps, an analysis of 350 microfinance institutions in 70 countries speckled the most interesting: Lending to women is simply less risky than lending to men.
Women have always been involved in small, usually home-based businesses. Nowadays, woman as a business-person is emerging in the open market as a women entrepreneur. Now they are more noticeable, resolute and ambitious towards their decision of being an entrepreneur.
Due to awakening and desire for an economic independence amongst women, a large number of women entrepreneurs have appeared on the map of entrepreneurship all over the world. She truly means Business!
-Poonam Yadav
