Indian Women Entrepreneurs: Breaking Barriers & Achieving Success
A quote from Ruth Bader Ginsberg is quite topical “As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.”
We are seeing this exemplified in our Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem. The past few years have seen a growth of women venturing into and succeeding as entrepreneurs and nothing begets success like success. According to media reports, over 20% of MSMEs are owned by women entrepreneurs in India which amounts to 23.3% of the labor force. Also interesting is that 50% of India’s start-up ecosystem is empowered by women in some way.
Falguni Nayar of Nykaa has become a role model to women and indeed entrepreneurs all over. An entrepreneur, who started a company and took it to IPO, and an Entrepreneur who said there is no “no”. Women are seeing this and believing they can also make it happen. I believe that one reason women in entrepreneurship succeed is that they work harder to take advantage of the limited opportunities that are out there. Also, there is a self-sustaining cycle where women who have succeeded, want to mentor other women to succeed in entrepreneurship.
Closer look at the inherent toolset of entrepreneurial women
We talk about women inherently possessing much of the “toolset” that an entrepreneur needs. Women by nature are a people person – they know how to create a network for information and resources and manage groups of people from friends, vendors, the workforce and others. Entrepreneurship is very much about getting to know and leveraging the right people.
Women are great multi-taskers (work vs home responsibilities, managing expenses to a budget, being a teacher to a supervisor of the work the workforce) and creative at figuring out ways to juggle these different balls. An entrepreneur needs to be persistent – basically, get the job done and done well. And women can be relentless. A good entrepreneur understands the customer’s need and how to solve that need in a way that “delights” the customer.
Very often, successful women entrepreneurs have built solutions targeting the market they know themselves – the woman. You look at Sara Blakely who created Spanx, Vandana Luthra of VLCC, and Richa Kar of Zivame, all leveraged their personal experience as being part of a then underserved market, and made it big. I think women come with the advantage of having this “tool set”, and many times, at a point in their lives, without realizing they have actually honed the “tool set” .
What women need is to take the next step of getting this realization, adding to it a dash of confidence to put their idea out there and ask for help to make it real, and just not taking no for an answer. I believe that women have an inner strength that enables them to deal with the unexpected and to manage and learn from failure, with the attitude of not giving up or saying it can’t be done. As Oprah Winfrey once said “Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail.”
A woman inherently is different from a man- will think differently and act differently. As an entrepreneur, a woman can use this to her advantage – yes she will stand out and come under more scrutiny. Revel in that and as Obama said “Yes we can”.
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