As 20 Aussies stood before the G20 Young Entrepreneur Summit delegates at the Summit’s closing ceremony this week in Russia, we received the loudest roar of the day for something we promised to deliver as hosts of the event in 2014.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t for our Tourism Australia video (though they ‘oooed’ and ‘aaahed’ in all the right places), nor was it for the promise of a party atmosphere — the Mexicans don’t think we can top their effort last year anyway.
It was when I declared that one of the central themes of our summit would be about creating and empowering more female entrepreneurs.
The roar was so loud that one of the British delegates later said to me, “I thought the women were about to take the place over then and there!”
So why the incredible reaction?
Of the 20 delegations who participated in Moscow this week, Australia stood alone as the only one to have an equal gender split.
Credit for that goes not only to the young female ‘treps’ themselves, but to male entrepreneurs who head the Enterprise Network of Young Australians and who have made driving young female entrepreneurship in Australia a priority.
And they probably couldn’t have picked a group of young female entrepreneurs more passionate about championing that cause than the crew who came to Moscow. It’s been a genuinely inspiring and energising experience to connect with such like-minded young businesswomen.
There’s a reason for our passion and focus on this: our delegation understands the economic power of female entrepreneurs, given 62% of Australian small businesses are run by them.
That’s 62% of a sector of business that contributes billions into the Australian coffers annually.
But there are plenty of challenges ahead, including:
- The absence of women from the start-up space where we make up just 4% of founders
- The investor space, where we make up 3% of incubator Pollenizers’ investment base
- And the challenges women have in accessing capital and scaling their businesses.
- But we’re determined to overcome those challenges because we realise the extraordinary economic opportunities for empowering female entrepreneurs in creating jobs, driving GDP and closing the gender pay gap in Australian society.
What I’ve come to realise this week, as highlighted by the roar of the crowd, is just how salient these challenges are for young entrepreneurs across the G20 nations, despite us facing some very different hurdles.
Take the Saudi Arabian delegate who I had a lengthy conversation with about women in business. He said their research had identified nine additional barriers to female entrepreneurship, but that the most prevalent two were that it was near impossible to get anyone from a Saudi bank or Saudi investor to bank on women. The second major barrier was that business regulations varied from city to city, but all prescribe the types of businesses women are allowed to launch. In cities like Riad, that leaves women with just four options for the kinds of businesses they can operate.
These barriers mean that of the more than 4000 businesses the Saudi delegate’s organisation had assisted in developing business plans for (more than 1500 of which then went on to launch), fewer than 100 were women-owned. And that was after the launch of a specific ‘women in business’ initiative.
Their story is not an anomaly among G20 nations.
As Australia takes the torch and prepares for its turn at hosting the ‘Olympic Games’ of young entrepreneurship in 2014, this year’s delegates want to harness the energy of that closing ceremony roar, of the passion, enthusiasm and appetite for pushing female entrepreneurship.
We want to come up with a pragmatic roadmap for how the G20 nations can create and empower women in business.
Want to know how a group of young female entrepreneurs stay ‘on’ and keep their energy levels high? Click here to read their advice.