In this blogpost, Divyaish Kumar Srivastava, Student, Shri Harish Chandra P.G. College, Varanasi, writes about the reason why India needs more women entrepreneurs
Women entrepreneurs in India are less in number than male entrepreneurs, and that is a well-known fact. However, the fact doesn’t end here, studies and survey also point out that in terms of global scenario Indian women entrepreneurs are far behind other countries. Even though the changing mindset of the people in India has shown optimistic results but yet there is a lot to be done. The given diagram points to the fact:
Source : www.entrepreneur.com
As it can be clearly seen that India ranks at 29th position and hails far back from US, Canada, Australia and even is behind Uganda, Ghana and Tunisia and even fails to reach 20 score points and has 17 points which only puts India above the neighboring countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. For the betterment of women entrepreneurs, there is a lot to be done in India. However, the question that arises here is what makes women entrepreneurs in India lead backwards in comparison to the world.
The problem can be understood in the following manner
- The Society: – Considering the fact that attitude towards women in India is evolving does not shade the reality that India is still traditionally a patriarchal society. This presents challenges for women entrepreneurs. For example- entrepreneurship requires strong skills to promote the business – and many women are uncomfortable promoting their skills as they fall prey to the old age tampering that women must put the needs of other on her own.
- Lack of assistance: – . Just like the male entrepreneurs the women to need assistance in business planning and arrangement of finance, the areas where they are not directly exposed to. When a woman’s small business begins to expand, a time comes when she needs to chart out a clear path of what her vision business is going to look like. Besides this family support is also a necessary need. Part of our social values state that women must devote time and attention to work and family life.
- Financing: – Not to sound like oxymoronic, Indian women are safe risk takers as compared to men. They prefer to make investments only to the extent they can pay off easily rather than going for an investment that could be described as over-confident. This amounts to most of them opting to self-finance their business out of their savings. But the modern scenario states that they should also look forward to investors and loans or grants.
“India needs more women to become entrepreneurs. Fashion e-commerce companies like Myntra and Jabong are all-male. I think female sensibility is lacking, and India needs more of that. A lot of fashion commerce companies in the US have female co-founders.” These words were said in an interview with The Times of India by Kartik Hosanagar, teacher at Wharton Business School.
Why is there a need of more women entrepreneurs in India
An article on women entrepreneurs in India in the Forbes India website states the global position of Indian women entrepreneurs. It states that “In India, women comprise about 30 percent of corporate senior management positions, which is notably higher than the global average (24 percent). But in the overall workforce, India is one of the worst countries in the world — 113th out of 135 — when it comes to the gender gap. And women entrepreneurs constitute only 10 percent of the total number of entrepreneurs in the country.”
The question why we need more entrepreneurs has good unobjectionable answers. Women leaders in India can be good to invest with because they control the vast majority of household spending. So if the business is of such a nature that it is wholly concerned with men, women are more likely to understand the customers in a better way. Another quality that women possess is that they are often better at building long-term relationships than men. Lasting optimistic relationships benefit a business tremendously. And these are not just mere facts, but they have proof hidden behind them.
Statistics show that business startups with women as co-founders have a bigger success rate than those with only men.
Source : forbesindia.com
From the above data, it can strongly be concluded that Indian women entrepreneurs, if given the same opportunity as global women entrepreneurs, they can prove to be a challenging factor before the world which would be a better standpoint keeping the Indian entrepreneurship in mind.
