BlogHere we go again! The government’s Budget pledge to set up a £12.5m fund for female entrepreneurs might initially have been lost in the minutiae, but it’s re-ignited the debate about whether female entrepreneurs should be treated differently to men.
It’s widely accepted we need more women in business. Female entrepreneurs run just 15% of UK businesses and if women started up at the same rate as men, we’d have 100,000 more new companies each year.
Yet female-only policies remain a prickly issue; with both men and women. Some just oppose all forms of positive discrimination, while many women in business express frustration at being unable to separate their gender from their success as an entrepreneur.
It’s become common place at business awards to hear cries of ‘will you have a male entrepreneur of the year award as well as female?’, yet female-only support groups continue to grow.
It remains unclear exactly what the new female entrepreneurs fund will actually look like, but the fact it’s already been welcomed and derided suggests the debate over its validity will stretch considerably further than the £12.5m behind it…
What do you think? Is there a role for positive discrimination? How else do we encourage more female entrepreneurs?
0 TrackBacks
1 Comments
Maybe they should read "The Illusions Of Entrepreneurship" by Scott Shane. Yes it's about the USA but I suspect a lot of the findings mirror the UK.
In particular his findings on why there are less female entrepreneurs might be relevant.