The next 8th March the International Women’s Day will take place. The date was declared in 1975 by the UN after the fire in a New York shirt factory that killed 146 people and marked the struggle for women’s rights.
The woman’s role in the business world has not the acknowledgement it deserves, despite the great progresses achieved in our society. Female personnel are still minority on company boards of directors or in management positions, but it is especially important in entrepreneurship.
We use the annual report about the entrepreneurial activity in our country developed by the GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) to analyze the situation. In this report it is remarked that gender is other of the social demographic aspects that make the difference within the entrepreneurial population.
In the graphic below, it is shown the Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) according to gender in 2018 in Spain and matching it with the sex of the respondents. The male participation in entrepreneurial activities has often been higher than females. These differences exist even today in the Spanish context.
The data show that 53.1% of the TEA is composed by men, whereas 46.9% is composed by women in the last year. Therefore, 5-6 out of ten identified entrepreneurial people were men and 4-5 were women. These differences between men and women have fortunately been visibly narrowed in the last years. Furthermore, this graphic shows the TEA evolution in the number of entrepreneurial women from 2005 to 2018:
It is worth noting that these differences are both quantitative and qualitative due to the variety of sectors in which the entrepreneurship is carried out. Women often undertake in retail market and in people-oriented services, which triggers in a lower payment. According to National Observatory of Equity in Entrepreneurship, Women’s business initiatives are mainly concentrated in the service sector (85% of women versus 65% of men), in activities such as trade, which have fewer entry barriers, but which have high competition, reduced profit margins and lower chances of survival.
Despite this negative scenario in objective terms, female entrepreneurship is seen as a need for the economic growth of developing countries, as well as for the own work and family emancipation of women in countries all over the world, also in developed countries. This entrepreneurship is the key to make women’s empowerment a reality and, in this way, be able to achieve equality in the work and professional field.
In Fellow Funders we encourage you to carry on and to start you own way. There will always be a “yes” behind every “no” which supports you to go forward. Moreover, you can visit associations like Womenalia, the professional network for women who can help you to achieve your goals and to keep in touch with women who are in the same situation.
“You are the boss of your own life. Don’t let anyone tell you how far you can go” Fellow Funders women team
Sources: GEM, Acción contra el hambre
Fellow Funders team
