If we look at the world of business, women currently account for only 7% of CEOs among FTSE 100 companies, although we are getting closer to Lord Davies’s target of boards being 30% female by 2020; we are currently standing at 25%. In Scotland, recent stats show that 7,100 female-led businesses were started in Scotland last year, contributing £286 million to the economy. At first glance this is a fantastic number, but the overall number has declined by more than 2% since 2012 and accounts for only a third of the total number of businesses started.
In the world of higher education 45% of the UK’s academic staff are women but only 22% of professors are female (2013-2014 figures). This number is even lower, at 18%, across Europe.
All these statistics point out that although there has been huge progress in terms of women’s rights, there is still a lot of work to be done and this year’s slogan for International Women’s Day, #BeBoldForChange, is highly relevant. We will need to be BOLD across all aspects of our lives to change things for the better.
My childhood was spent in Soviet Russia where “not working” was illegal and all women around me: my mother, her friends and my friends’ mothers worked full time. It was a way of living where having a career was expected rather than a choice. Having an upbringing surrounded by very strong female role models has shaped my own attitude to aspire to do my best and always aim high. Relocating to Scotland and starting my own business opened up a plethora of opportunities for me far beyond what I could have imagined, and with opportunities came choices that were rarely black and white.
In my current role within Converge Challenge - a pan-Scotland company creation competition for all nineteen Scottish universities - we see more than 200 potential company founders every year. 30% of them are female and what’s even more important is that 30% of our winners are women as well. Over the last five years, from the 62 companies that we helped start, 22 have female founders. It is clear that the challenges of starting a business are the same for men and women; securing investment, building a team, and finding new customers are key issues that are faced by any fledgling business.
Scotland has achieved very significant progress in starting companies but scaling them is still something that we struggle with and currently this topic is attracting a lot of attention both in the UK and Europe. There are practical things that can be done, such as helping small companies to attract commercial expertise into the teams and easing access to finance. But in many ways, scaling up is a numbers game; the more companies we start, the more chances we have that some of these companies will grow.
This approach needs to be taken with female-led businesses. Unless we aim for 50% of applicants to Converge Challenge and to all other support mechanisms being female, we will never achieve gender balance. Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook talks about studies that show, more boys than girls want to lead. We need to understand the leadership ambition gap and close that gap so that we have more girls wanting to lead. At Converge, we ask our participants to Rise to the Challenge! We ensure that our judging panels have strong female members that our events showcase leading female speakers and our case studies highlight the successes of our female entrepreneurs. The more of these seemingly small yet practical things we do, the more chance there is that a girl graduating in 2017 will set her sights on being a CEO, a professor or even a leader of the free world.
By Dr Olga Kozlova, Director Converge Challenge
