The one thing that would help female entrepreneurs

There’s a World Turtle Day.  A Bubble Bath Day.  And even a Talk Like Shakespeare Day. So about a year ago, Wendy Diamond found herself wondering: Why on earth is there no Women’s Entrepreneurship Day?

Diamond, an entrepreneur and editor of Animal Fair magazine, officially announced the day in February 2014 – and November 19 marked the first ever Women’s Entrepreneurship Day celebration in New York. To celebrate, we asked Diamond along with four other experts: What’s one thing we can do in the U.S. to support female entrepreneurs around the world?

Wendy Diamond, entrepreneur, founder of Women’s Entrepreneurship Day: We need to create and sustain a movement that builds awareness around many of the issues that can limit women entrepreneurs. For example, access to capital.  That also means building awareness to a lot of the statistics around how women use money. When you give a woman a loan, she pays it back at a 97 percent rate. Women tend to invest 90 percent of earned income in their families to educate their children and make sure they’re vaccinated. These are investments that better entire communities.

And yet, women are underpaid and undervalued. The key is building awareness around this – and the need to empower and support women. When I launched this day back in February, I had no business plan. But today, we’ve got 144 countries around the world celebrating this day, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. This is an awareness movement – one that we must sustain long after this day of celebration concludes.

Jamil Wyne, Head of the Wamda Research Lab: One way the U.S. can help to support female entrepreneurs is to fund research and impact evaluation programs focusing on female entrepreneurship in emerging markets.

For the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) specifically there is growing knowledge and discussion of the gap between male and female entrepreneurs. Understanding why specifically these gaps exist and which programs are most effective in both reducing the divide and creating a more even playing field is critical. Good research to create new data and a focus on impact evaluation can help in boosting local knowledge of what works and what does not work. This knowledge can then lead to ensuring that future funding goes to the correct organizations and initiatives.

Funding these types of projects could also introduce new questions: Is the gender gap spread evenly across industries? Is it consistent across firm sizes and growth rates? How easy or hard is it for a female entrepreneur to hire new employees?

Supporting local entrepreneurship ecosystems in answering these questions can go a long way in understanding why a gap exists and what is the best way of closing it.

Listen: How we can hack diversity in the tech industry.

Kathy Calvin, UN Foundation President: Addressing the needs and rights of the world’s girls and women is not only the right thing to do, it is essential to alleviating poverty, promoting development, and achieving U.S. foreign policy goals. There are many ways to support women entrepreneurs, such as expanding access to savings, but one key area that needs more attention is closing the gender data gap.

Right now, we are missing important information to guide our investments and policies to empower girls and women. In many countries, we lack solid data on critical aspects of women’s lives – such as when they were born and how they die, how many hours they work and in what sector, and whether they have experienced violence. This negatively impacts our ability to create effective policy toward gender equality and women’s empowerment.

There is a growing recognition of this problem. Data2X, launched by then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and led by the UN Foundation, serves as a platform for partners to come together to improve the collection and use of gender data. By supporting more and better data, the U.S. and the global development community can advance smarter policies to help more girls and women reach their full potential.

Robin J. Ely and Colleen Ammerman of the Harvard Business School, and Pamela Stone of Hunter College, co-authors of the “Life and Leadership after Harvard Business School”:  Women entrepreneurs are pioneers, visionaries, and risk-takers, but like other working women, they often battle perceptions about their fitness for, or commitment to, work. Like other ambitious women, they contend with assumptions that their family responsibilities, current or future, will divert their attention and diminish their capabilities; that they are not cut out for leadership; and that they are ultimately less committed than their male peers to the companies they founded. Nonetheless, female entrepreneurism is exploding.  Indeed, women entrepreneurs often strike out on their own in order to avoid the stereotypes and career dead-ends they’ve encountered in previous “regular” jobs.

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for women entrepreneurs to find that these same biases, held not by their managers but by potential funders, make it difficult for them to secure the lifeblood of any start-up:  capital. The widespread notion that women are “riskier” than men—riskier to hire, to promote, or to fund—is the major problem holding back women entrepreneurs. Without capital, women can’t get businesses started; without sufficient capital, they can’t grow them or take them to scale.  Yet only a small percentage of capital goes to women-led ventures: from 2011 to 2013, just 2.7 percent of companies receiving venture capital funding had a female CEO.  Funding earmarked for women will surely help some female entrepreneurs, but a broader shift in venture capitalists’ attitudes and perceptions is needed—from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.  To level the playing field, and top up women’s coffers, it’s time to check gender-based skepticism about women’s competence and commitment and evaluate women’s ventures on merit.

This article is published in collaboration with New America. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Wendy Diamond is the Founder/CEO of Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, Founder/CEO and CPO of Animal Fair Media, leading animal welfare advocate, best-selling author, well-known TV personality

Image: An office worker is reflected on the roof of a building. REUTERS/Daniel Munoz.