how can creating a venture boost girls’ confidence and economic empowerment?
First we need to start with the elephant in the room: What keeps girls from imagining themselves as entrepreneurs?
I believe it starts early. Fear of social rejection can drive creativity right out of us at an early age. We are laughed at (or afraid of being laughed at) when we create something new and show it to the world.
Girls are often told their ideas don’t matter or that they’re silly or stupid. Girls are told they aren’t risk takers. Girls are told they aren’t aggressive or tough enough for the job. And girls listen. We take it in, we internalize this, and then we believe it to be true. And we sell ourselves short.
This problem gets amplified during puberty when girls’ confidence falls off a cliff. According to Girl Talk, girls’ self-esteem peaks at age 9. And research reveals that this confidence deficit just keeps growing and growing. We end up wasting much of our time and energy worrying about how the rest of the world sees and judges us.
Call to mind a successful startup founder.
Who do you see?
Musk? Bezos? Zuckerberg? Altman? Jobs? Gates?
In what way are they all the same? I think we can all agree that none of them are girls.
Yes, they all had smart, scalable business ideas. But bad ideas are not what’s holding women back. Believe me, I hear this A LOT. And so I will state again for the record that women are amazing entrepreneurs and inventors. Women gave birth to the first programming language, treatments for cancer, duct tape, white out, life rafts, bras, the Murphy bed, dishwashers, car heater, Kevlar, home security systems, ice cream, call waiting, non-glare eye glasses, caller ID, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, windshield wipers, aquariums, malaria treatment, coffee filters, space station power systems. Need I go on? The bottom line is that women do have great ideas - viable, desirable, and marketable ideas. Ideas that make money and improve society.
The problem is that not enough people believe in girls and invest in their ideas. Not enough people are encouraging girls to be entrepreneurs early. And this blocks a very lucrative path to financial independence. Because entrepreneurship is one of the most accessible paths to wealth in the US.
And here’s where it gets really ugly. Despite better incomes, women’s economic disadvantage has not become a relic of a prior generation. There isn’t a single country on the planet in which women collectively don’t have less money and economic opportunity than men. And our hard-won gains over the past few decades appear to be ebbing away. The fact that men have more wealth than women is one of the factors that fundamentally shape our world.
The persistence of the women’s wealth gap is a problem at the heart of women’s struggle for economic, political, and social equality. And we all know that wealth compounds over time.
Becoming a mom typically worsens a woman’s financial position. When mothers leave the workforce to care for their children, they end up sacrificing their personal wealth opportunities. For every 1 year a woman leaves the workforce to be a full-time caregiver, she must work 5 extra years to make up for the lost income and benefits. When mothers switch to part-time work (75% of part-time workers are women), they also sacrifice wealth creation via lower pay, no healthcare or retirement savings.
Because women earn less, take more career breaks, reach an earlier salary peak and die later, they have a higher likelihood of facing extreme poverty in their old age or completely running out of money.
What can help?
Well, lots of things, e.g., eliminating the gender pay gap and providing universal childcare and free, high-quality early education. At present, the price of center-based childcare for an infant exceeds the cost of housing in the Midwest, Northeast and South; in those three regions and the West, the price of childcare exceeds tuition at a four-year public university. But that’s a problem for another article.
What I’m advocating here is for early entrepreneurship education. Because I believe teaching girls’ entrepreneurship skills can make a difference. Competence builds confidence. Learning problem solving, design thinking, and business skills will boost girls’ confidence and this confidence will compound and grow over time.
The good news is that women make terrific startup founders and are a great investment bet. See the list of women’s inventions listed above. But there’s even more positive data to support this claim. Women-led ventures perform better over time. For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents. In other words, women-led ventures generate 10% more in cumulative revenue.
Don’t believe me? Check out this graphic…
Why do women-founded ventures perform so well?
Most likely because they solve real problems that 51% of the population have and are willing to pay to have solved. The market will reward ventures that address an unmet demand.
At Girl Gonna Launch we want to uplevel women’s wealth and economic power. Because we believe women entrepreneurs have the potential to drive real economic growth for themselves, their families, their communities, and the nation. But we need to start early. We need to equip girls with the confidence and competence to startup and scaleup as teens and pre-teens.
So, let’s get started! Let’s start in middle school and see what happens! Because nothing bad happens when we believe in and encourage our children’s positive and smart ideas.
Sources:
Chang, Mariko Lin. Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It. Oxford University Press, 2012
Collins, Caitlyn. Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Criado Perez, Caroline. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press, 2019.
Marçal, Katrine, and Alex Fleming. Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men. New York, NY: Abrams Press, 2021.