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“Some women felt they were in an environment where there were no senior females; it was a very masculine environment. They felt they had to break through the glass ceiling to get into senior positions. So they left to start up their own business, where they could do their own thing and create a more collaborative, female-friendly environment.”
“There were women in their late-30s, maybe very early-40s, who had young children and said, ‘I really, really want to have a great career but I’m being put into a second tier role because I cannot travel or work as late into the evenings as I used to, and that’s not acceptable. I don’t want to have a second tier role, I want to have a fabulous career.’”
“Other countries are doing more [than the UK] to help female entrepreneurs. Canada is up there, Netherlands, Australia, the US; and one of the things that some of them are doing is helping to educate women in STEM at a much earlier age and then building their confidence in those areas.”
“A number of our entrepreneurs said the first thing they get asked in an interview is, ‘How do you combine both your career and a family?’ When do you ever hear that being asked of a man?”
“I would love to see people lobbying more, governments engaging more and thinking about how we can use this great workforce we’ve got, be it women, or older people who are also very disadvantaged. How can we encourage these people to thrive and contribute to the economy?”
“The group hardest hit by Covid has been women over fifty. They’re the most likely to have been furloughed, and the most likely to have lost their jobs. That’s because they’ve got the double whammy of being the primary carers, and because it’s easier to retire people that are over fifty. But because of this, more women than ever before are looking at being entrepreneurs.”
“A number of our interviewees spoke about how they wanted to created a more open, collaborative and empathetic workplace environment. They felt better decisions were made if everybody has an equal say and everyone can openly give their point of view and debate it, so that there is a more 360-degree view and therefore better outcomes.”
“A number of women talked about how their husband was their rock. So, they might play a more advisory role in the business, or they might help out a bit on the marketing, for instance, but the women were still the primary leader. But they talked about their husband’s as their rock because firstly the husband supported the business idea totally—they wanted their partner to succeed in it—and the women felt their partner was giving them honest advice.”
“Women have to multi-task more because unfortunately, in 2020, women are still doing more of the housework and childcare.”
“Older men with grey hair are seen as having gravitas and experience, whereas older women are seen as past it.”
“72% of female entrepreneurs self-fund through crowd-sourcing or remortgaging their house or taking money from friends or family, because they can’t get venture capital.”
“As soon as a woman is expected to be determined and ambitious and decisive, men get a little bit uncomfortable because they think she’s not being very feminine. I think this is a hard area for women to balance, in terms of being strong and firm but not being overly masculine.”
“Women tend to be more risk aware, so they do more due diligence.”
“We thought the success of entrepreneur would be down to having a great idea, but that is not true. The success of an entrepreneur is the determination to be one, the courage to take the leap, the resilience to keep going, the confidence to learn from your mistakes.”