Women: Europe’s Under-Exploited Entrepreneurial Potential
The Parliament Magazine, London
in Opinion
Written by
8 February 2018
Getting more women to start and scale up their business is a key to Europe’s economic growth, explains Lowri Evans
The European economy is reliant on the vibrancy of its SMEs and on the prospects entrepreneurship brings. Entrepreneurship is a powerful driver of economic growth and job creation, especially when small companies become big companies.
From that perspective, Europe is not performing as well as the US, and we need more companies scaling up to reap the opportunities offered by globalisation. This is obviously true for businesses run by women.
Women represent a large pool of under-exploited entrepreneurial potential in Europe. On average, women represent fewer than 30 per cent of entrepreneurs in Europe, and this number has remained static over the last decade. Also, when they do start their own business, women tend to have more conservative entrepreneurial ambitions and to have less proclivity to scale up.
The obstacles to women entrepreneurship are partly societal and partly economic. Initiatives targeting women specifically can help address our self-limitations. For example, making positive role models known and visible or setting up business networks which have a gender dimension are part of the answer to women’s relative lack of confidence and conservative attitude to risk.
Women are also disproportionately affected by the difficulties which all entrepreneurs face: digitalisation and access to funding.
First, having appropriate digital skills is now indispensable to the success of any entrepreneur. The digital gap is considerable and actually increasing. In 2015 data, women represented only 16 per cent of the ICT specialists and 17 per cent of ICT students.
Not all companies are digitally-driven but most need to be digitally enabled. Every woman setting up a business needs to understand what digitalisation means for her sector. So we need ICT schemes that target all women who want to get into business, across all generations not just young women.
Secondly, there is a structural problem with access to finance in the European economy generally. We need to get massively more money into the European system, for all who want to create a business.
