Women Entrepreneurs Are Innovating in Their Businesses; It’s Time to Help Them Succeed

The Globe and Mail / Toronto

CLARE BECKTON, ANDREW IRVINE AND JANICE MCDONALD
CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Clare Beckton is the executive in Residence-CREWW at Carleton University; Andrew Irvine is head of customer solutions, Canadian personal and business banking with the Bank of Montreal; Janice McDonald is the president of The Beacon Agency.

Today, when we look at who starts and owns businesses, the world looks much different than it did 50 years ago.

Female-led enterprises now represent half of all new businesses, while just less than half of all small and medium-sized businesses are either entirely or partly owned by women. As well, female-led businesses, while tending to be smaller than male-led businesses, create more jobs and have higher survival rates when we compare them by their growth metrics.

But female-led businesses, even today, remain constrained by a number of key factors. Across the country, women express frustration with a lack of access to capital, ageism and sexism and harassment from investors and clients. As well, they deal with the reality that mainstream networks, incubators and accelerators often don’t cater to female entrepreneurs and the industries in which they operate.

To help investigate these issues and find solutions, BMO, Carleton University and the Beacon Agency, with support from the Government of Canada, have come together to help solve this problem – to investigate what’s happening with female entrepreneurs and the environment in which they seek to operate. What we found was a significant impediment to the success of these businesses – a lack of recognition of the innovative capabilities of these women.

Throughout our travels interviewing them, we were struck by the eagerness they showed in telling us their stories of resilience and pride in their contributions through their businesses. But we also experienced their frustration about the barriers they continue to face. They told us about the negative effects of these impediments, despite the fact that these exceptional business talents – women entrepreneurs are innovating – everywhere, every day, across the country.

A significant part of the issue relates to the fact that most businesses started by women are concentrated in the service sector; meanwhile, women are typically underrepresented in the science and technology sector.

This reality runs up against a marketplace where key participants still tend to define innovation in terms of technology and goods. The result is a situation where innovations that flow from other parts of the marketplace – innovations often created by women running service companies – are not seen in a similar, positive light.

Read on….