Increasing household earnings, the amount of employment available, the amount of money generated, and the number of people living in poverty are all directly impacted by the actions of female entrepreneurs. There are also enormous positive effects on society when women take the initiative to start their own businesses. Women’s entrepreneurial activity level has global ramifications because starting a business is an occupational avenue for women to grow economically. BUT HOW WOMEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP CAN BE NEW TREND FOR FUTURE BUSINESS?
Female entrepreneurship also has a good impact on the human, educational, and health development of a nation. This is because women are more likely to invest their earnings within their homes, family, and the communities that are immediately surrounding them. Women in the business report increased confidence in their ability to forge their identities and direct their professional destinies. They get the confidence and self-assurance to engage in more risky behaviours, which paves the way for expanded opportunities for their advancement. There are a lot of individuals who are unaware of the idea that there have been female entrepreneurship going on for a very long time in history. The city of Assur, located in northern Iraq, is where the history of the earliest well-documented businesswomen can be traced back to the year 1870 BC. Women of the Assyrian culture at that period often made significant contributions to the expansive commerce networks that grew in the area, demonstrating that men were not the only ones involved in the business at the time.
Because they typically anticipate a hostile reaction, women are less inclined to engage in self-promotion or self-advocacy at work. According to the research findings, this is true even when there is no difference in the level of performance capacity between men and women. These shifts, which challenge negative portrayals of women in the media or give individuals more agency to fight for equitable compensation, will contribute to a more even distribution of resources. And even while progress is taking place, there is still a long way to go. Business in the future will look very different because of women. A stronger focus on gender equality is beneficial to the development of new businesses, goods, and services across a wide variety of sectors. This is beneficial to the company and the customers, as it provides them with more options tailored to their specific needs. In recent years, there has been some progress toward addressing the lack of women in positions of authority, even though this remains a problem.
In addition, women in these positions bring a different set of qualifications and capacities to the desk, which can assist outside of transformation. Studies have indicated that detrimental social norms and stereotypes about women and men are some of the primary drivers of the continuing gender gap. These social standards will evolve when more women enter the workforce and achieve success there, and more women become entrepreneurs and bring about change. Women working in business today are challenging the status quo and contributing to deconstructing negative preconceptions. Once more, this ties up with the subject of “Choose to Challenge”, which was celebrated on International Women’s Day. Today’s pioneers are the ones who are molding the future of business for years to come, which will benefit everyone.
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WOMEN IN BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT
Women have emerged as key contributors to economic expansion on a global scale. When it comes to enhancing the results of businesses, achieving gender diversity in the workplace is of the utmost importance. Despite this, women continue to be underrepresented in the business world, particularly at higher levels of management. It is incredibly uncommon for women to hold executive management positions or participate on company boards of directors. Despite this, women quickly catch up to males regarding their percentage of university education completion. Even though they make up a pool of vibrant and competent talent, women continue to be underutilized despite the significant progress that has been accomplished. According to a study by Babson College, organizations with at least one woman occupying a C-suite position tend to have substantially higher valuations than organizations with than just one man working in senior positions. Companies with at least one female executive are worth 64 percentage points more at the time of first funding and 49 percentage points more at the time of final budgeting. It should come as no surprise, given those figures, that the percentage of early-stage investments made in businesses that include at least one female executive has increased significantly over the past 15 years, tripling to 15% from a meager 5%. Still, there is certainly room for more growth in this area.
As a result, women have different life and work experiences than men, and as a result, they have different viewpoints. This is a significant benefit that women may bring to the corporate world and management. As a result, this gives rise to alternative views, distinct choices, and distinct courses of action. As a result, this diversity makes it possible for decision-making to become more multi-dimensional and, as a result, more all-encompassing. Compared to boards consisting entirely of men, those with at least one female member are typically slower to provide the “go” signal for acquisitions. This is because women tend to be less risk-taking and more strategic than men. Although this inclination may result in fewer and less substantial acquisitions, making more thoughtful and informed judgments is possible. Opportunities for employment and entrepreneurial endeavors inspire individuals to participate in civil life, keep them out of conflict, and promote long-term answers to the problem of how to generate sustainable wealth. Particularly marginalized populations are at particular risk of being shut out of these changes in the private sector, which can be particularly problematic. Numerous studies indicate that mothers spend up to 90 % of their income on things that directly benefit their children and families. These expenditures include nutritious food, clean water, school fees, and medication. Women can better provide for and protect their children when they are booming economically.
IMPORTANCE OF WOMAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN 2022
2021 has been a difficult period for everyone. It has seen economies struggle and businesses suffer due to the pandemic-induced lockdown restrictions. Amid these difficult times, we witnessed entrepreneurs rising above challenges and innovating in real-time to cater to their audiences in a never-before-seen ecosystem.
With the new normal bringing new market challenges, women entrepreneurs from retail-tech, agri-tech, alco-Bev, eCommerce, and communications have stepped up to design new businesses and products to impact the ecosystem and make consumers’ lives easier. With this golden age of globalization, digitization, digitalization, and start-up booms, India is witnessing a change in regard to the number of women who are starting their own businesses. Women who start businesses in the modern day are not necessarily descended from long-established business families or from segments of the population with higher incomes. In addition, they come from a diverse range of backgrounds and locations around the nation. Women are becoming more prevalent in industries that have historically been the strongholds of male dominance, such as the management of sports media organizations, construction enterprises, security and detective services, and more. The function that women play in our society has undergone profound transformations in the recent decades, decades, and those transformations have been for the better. Nowadays, women are now they are taking over corporate roles that were traditionally considered to be reserved for men and are even outperforming their male counterparts in several domains. The gender preconceptions that were more common in society decades ago are gradually disappearing, but it will take some time. In the process of problem-solving, women bring a unique set of perspectives to the table, which can improve the overall quality of the solution. Women bring a variety of challenges and experiences to the table, each of which has the potential to increase the quality of the choice. During the course of the previous decade, it became widely acknowledged that female entrepreneurs represent a substantial untapped source of economic growth. Women entrepreneurs generate new work opportunities, not only for themselves but also for others, by offering alternative approaches to management problems.
CHALLENGES OF WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS
Even though it is impossible to deny that over the last decade, women have started businesses and achieved success in their firms, some of the challenges women company owners face still exist. Despite the passage of time, which has resulted in over 252 million women starting their businesses worldwide, these women still struggle to overcome the obstacles they encounter consistently. Hence, women make up nearly one-third of all entrepreneurs worldwide; hence, their prospects have never appeared brighter on paper. Sadly, these numbers only represent a portion of their narrative, and males continue to oversee a significant amount of the company’s operations. As is the case in the vast majority of fields in the modern world, gender norms are significantly impacting the ecology of entrepreneurship and posing considerable obstacles for women worldwide.
1 . Gaining access to financial resources.
2 . Having difficulty being taken seriously by others
3 . Taking responsibility for your past successes
4 . Establishing a system of mutual assistance
5 . Striking a balance between work and family life
6 . Overcoming fear of falling short of expectations
7 . Establishing a Foothold in the Market
8 . Minimal support
9 . Inadequate Educational Opportunities
10 . Conflict Involving Roles
11 . Unfavorable Environment
12 . Not having enough mental fortitude
13 . Tough Rivalry in This Field
14 . Missing Role Models
15 . Balanced Regional Development
16 . Lack of an Entrepreneurial Environment
17 . Not conforming to the norms of society.
THE JOURNEY OF WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS IS NOT EASY
Women scored higher than men in essential qualities such as working well in a group, being innovative, and solving problems. Such research is a witness to women’s enormous potential when provided with more favorable conditions, such as mentoring, capacity building, and access to capital, in addition to their innate leadership abilities, which are essential to success in entrepreneurship. It’s possible that there aren’t enough companies out there that cater specifically to the needs of women. Women have intimate knowledge of the challenges that other women encounter, and by coming up with original solutions to these challenges, women have the potential to not only help solve problems that affect one-half of the world’s population but also to establish new fields of endeavor. Even though businesses need to revise their workplace policies to be more accommodating to women in these circumstances, one possible solution is for these women to start their own businesses, which would give them more leeway to adapt their work and the demands placed on them to accommodate their many commitments. Women who have achieved success are more likely than males who have achieved success to be business owners. This allows them to pursue a personal interest while simultaneously making a beneficial contribution to the world. The findings of the Global Women’s Entrepreneurship Research indicate that women have a 1.17 times larger possibility than men of launching social initiatives rather than simply economic ventures and that women are more likely to engage in social entrepreneurship than males a 1.23 times greater likelihood of pursuing environmentally focused ventures than economically concentrated ventures. Women are discovering that their project management and marketing abilities may be used to obtain money from other female entrepreneurs for their firms.
Regarding the success of rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns, women outperform males. There are around 252 million female entrepreneurs in the world; 153 million of them are running firms that are already somewhat successful. There has been a 114 per cent increase in women who start their businesses over the past 20 years. Although this is a positive trend, the number of female entrepreneurs is still significantly lower than that of male entrepreneurs.
WOMEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Women’s entrepreneurship is one of the most popular and rapidly expanding job options available to women in urban and rural communities all around the world, particularly in countries that are still developing. In today’s highly digital society, the number of women-owned businesses is expanding at an exponential rate. This is due to the fact that women are gaining independence and confidence as a result of their participation in entrepreneurial endeavors. The number of women who start their own businesses is growing at an astounding rate all around the world, and in the past ten years, that rate has more than doubled. When it comes to establishing women’s entrepreneurship, funding is considered to be one of the primary hurdles. Women’s entrepreneurialism has been acknowledged as a significant contributor to economic expansion because it enables women to generate new employment opportunities for themselves while also supplying society with a variety of different solutions to issues pertaining to business, management, and organization. They are nevertheless a small part of all entrepreneurs, and beginning and expanding rapidly their organizations can be hard for them because of their gender. Some of these problems are exclusionary attribute, marriage, and inheritance laws and cultural practices, limited mobility, total absence of entry to info and networks, and so on. They still only make up a minority of all entrepreneurs. This, in essence, is linked to a growing interest in how entrepreneurship affects monetary development. Women are treated differently not only because they are the economically disadvantaged and discriminated-against gender, but also because they are regarded as a crucial factor in the development of entrepreneurship due to their distinct role within the household and the growing number of families in which the woman is the primary breadwinner in developing countries. This has led to the assignment of this special status. The companies that are owned by males vs those that are owned and managed by women also operate differently. We now know that companies held by women have a tendency to be smaller, and their growth is slower, than those owned by men. In addition, studies have shown that women-owned firms had a lower rate of profitability compared to those owned by men and a lower rate of sales turnover compared to those owned by men, even when comparing enterprises operating in the same industry. Recent research indicates that most of the time, there are more women running their own businesses in emerging countries than in industrialized regions. In the past, this has been linked to the reality that women in emerging global economies have a harder time getting into the formal job market. So, those who have no choice but to start their own businesses to get out of wage stagnation and, often, economic hardship. When an investigation was done into women entrepreneurship in Latin America and the Caribbean, for illustration, it was found that the poorest countries in the region, like Peru, had huge rates of women entrepreneurship, with one country having a rate of 35 percent. However, the study also found that only 13% of women innovators in the area said they thought their business would develop in the next 5 years. Even if they have the necessary skills and background knowledge, women often face obstacles in the form of adverse opportunities and incentives when attempting to launch their own enterprises.
Reference:
- https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/female-entrepreneurship-developing-countries
- Female Entrepreneurship Resource Point – Introduction and Module 1: Why Gender Matters
- Women’s entrepreneurship in developing countries from a family perspective: Past and future
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