Female entrepreneurs require more support and fewer roadblocks
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A new plan to drive female entrepreneurship, business success and wealth creation has warned that Australia cannot achieve its potential without leveraging the untapped entrepreneurial talent of women.
The ten-year plan, or Decadal, created by the Future Female Entrepreneurs Independent Expert Panel and supported by the Accelerator for Enterprising Women and Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia (COSBOA) sets out ten recommendations to fundamentally change the operating environment for women entrepreneurs.
Released in Parliament House this week, the recommendations call for educators to help bolster the female entrepreneurial pipeline by actively addressing gender stereotypes in school subject and course selection, hone skills at tertiary level and upskill women in specific expertise as they take on entrepreneurial pursuits later in their careers.
The 12-member expert panel, comprising business, policy and gender experts recommends universities and industry work together to create Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs to cross-pollinate with teacher training programs to help future teachers identify entrepreneurial career paths for their students.
It calls on industry and large businesses to follow Audible’s lead in the United States and proactively provide minority and women-owned business enterprises a wide range of support, including funding, toidentify and upskill women-owned businesses, and review their procurement processes so that women-owned businesses can successfully compete for tenders.
The report notes “There has never been a better time to cast a gender lens across procurement processes given concerns that efficiencies through AI could reinforce gender stereotypes”.
Meanwhile, support for microbusiness is required, starting with tracking better metrics and financial data to allow governments, financial institutions and investors to understand their work and contribution to the Australian economy.
The panel seeks better Government support and amplification of STEM pathways, and reputable entrepreneurial programs for under-represented groups, such as women with disabilities and migrant women, including reviewing their procurement policies and practices to demystify the preconditions for success, noting “there is an expansive and expensive ‘art’ when responding to government procurement which often rules women-owned business out of the application process”.
Finally, Australia needs an annual Women in Entrepreneurship and Wealth Creation Summit to drive collaboration, responsibility and accountability around these recommendations over the next ten years and to ensure there is a new pipeline of women entrepreneurs, a new pathway toward genuine economic equality of opportunity and a new kind of ‘demographic dividend’ that draws on the ingenuity of half of Australia’s population.
Fleur Anderson who is Program Director for the Academy for Enterprising Girls and Accelerator for Enterprising Women at 89 Degrees East, said entrepreneurship and self employment are important pathways for women’s economic security, and most critically for women escaping domestic violence.
“Only 10 per cent of women founders feel confident raising venture capital, compared to 30 per cent of men but make no mistake: the solution is not ‘fixing’ women’s confidence,” she says.
“If women had access to equal resources so that there were as many female entrepreneurs as men, the Australian economy would be better off by $71 billion to $135 billion. Reaching that parity will change lives and societies.”
Main image by Yan Krukau.
