Women are very poorly represented in our entrepreneurial economy. It’s been well known for some time that we are playing catch up in the boardroom, but progress there is at least starting to happen, with the number of FTSE 100 company female directors rising by 50% in the last five years. This is good news – after all, research carried out by McKinsey & Co has shown that companies with the greatest gender diversity on their executive teams are 21% more likely to outperform peers on profitability and 27% more likely to create superior value.
When it comes to startups however, there is still some way to go. The Female Founders project reported that just 13% of total equity funding in the UK currently goes to female founded businesses – and that the amounts awarded to those female founders tends to be smaller than those offered to men. Only one in three entrepreneurs is female – which equates to a gender gap equivalent to 1.1 million missing businesses. If you start looking at Asian women, it goes deeper again.
Government statistics show that UK unemployment is highest for women from a Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnic background at 10.1 per cent, compared to an overall female unemployment rate of 3.8 per cent – and only 10 per cent of Asian-owned businesses are majority-owned by women, compared to a 16 per cent average for all businesses.
There is clearly a need to encourage more female entrepreneurs from all demographics and as an Asian businesswoman I’m passionate about this but in particular those last few statistics – as I know where some of the reluctance comes from.
Growing up in India, I was taught that as a woman, my responsibility was to stay at home and not interact with men at all, as they “could not be trusted around women”. It was made very clear to me throughout my upbringing that successful businesswomen could never have a stable married life – which was of course, the ultimate goal for me.Even moving to the UK, this messaging continued. My role in life was to be a wife and mother – and even if I did get some sort of work, it needed to be local and not require travel or my being alone. My family was very loving, but very, very firm on this.
This messaging is far from unique in certain cultures, and it means that millions of women are still growing up being taught that they should not work, cannot be independent and need to protect themselves from men and the ‘big bad world’. This is 2021. It’s a crying shame.
I do have a daughter, but when I chose to start working and left her with a childcarer to pursue a career, my mother made it very clear that it was a bad decision. The family is the woman’s responsibility, you see. Sadly the pandemic has shown us that this is not confined to the my community, with more women being furloughed and taking on the responsibility of home-schooling and housework during lockdowns.
With so many women not being able to work through cultural barriers, there are missed opportunities – and so much guilt and imposter syndrome if they do manage to pursue a career. That messaging from birth has a profound effect and can take years to overcome – if at all.
The answer is for the younger generations to turn old traditional thinking on its head. Education, training and support is vital – I provide this to Asian women all over the world and while some areas enjoy great female entrepreneur stories (Hong Kong has an almost 50:50 split of male and female entrepreneurs), for women in the UK their stories are often the same: they have been indoctrinated into thinking they cannot be successful businesswomen and entrepreneurs.
We need this to change. Until it does, many women are missing out. And the world of business is missing out even more, which ultimately can only be holding the UK back.
