From financial barriers to gender roles, women entrepreneurs face a variety of unique challenges. ISB spoke to SHE-com founder and serial entrepreneur Lisa Jones about the top issues impacting female entrepreneurs today and what can be done to tackle them.
Lisa is the founder of numerous multi-million dollar businesses, including Ecoriginals, which she sold in 2019. Her latest venture is SHE-com, a community for women eCommerce founders.
SHE-com recently surveyed over 200 women business owners in its latest State of the SHE-nation survey. The vast majority – 81.3 per cent of the survey’s respondents – said they felt that societal gender expectations had made their entrepreneurial journey harder.
Unsurprisingly, traditional values about what a woman should be doing – caring for children, for instance – turn many women away from big business dreams, regardless of whether they are a mum or homemaker or not.
“The role of the female as the nurturer and the household caregiver traditionally made it difficult for women to feel that it was righteous for them to want to be an entrepreneur,” Lisa explains. “There’s imposter syndrome… and that concept of ‘women play small’.”
What’s holding women back right now?
If a woman does decide to start a business, there are both lifestyle and health barriers that she will probably face, according to Lisa. For instance, most mothers still shoulder the burden of childcare and household responsibilities, making it difficult if impossible to run an enterprise.
Many women also suffer in silence through gender-specific health issues, like menopause symptoms, hormonal changes, and “baby brain”. These too are obvious barriers to doing business.
But the logistical challenges don’t stop there. Another key finding of the SHE-com survey was that women entrepreneurs are struggling to finance their businesses. About one-fifth of respondents felt that their gender was a barrier to securing external business funding, a problem that Lisa attributes to a lingering gender bias in traditional lending institutions.
“I’d like to think that’s waning in this day and age, but I do think it probably does exist inside the existing funding banks and financial institutions who are all run mostly by men,” she says.
Women’s financial literacy and confidence still an issue
There’s also a bigger and more insidious problem at play here, Lisa says; women’s lack of financial literacy and confidence.
“I honestly believe there’s an element of women who are great at the creative aspects of building a business, but not very financially literate,” she explains. “And financial literacy is very important if you’re trying to get funding.”
A big part of SHE-com’s operations is teaching women entrepreneurs financial skills. Lisa says she’s seen women struggle with tasks like making forward projections or drafting profit and loss statements. She adds that many also lack confidence around money, struggling to articulate their venture’s value and to ask for large sums.
“Women struggle, sometimes, to make the business case sound as amazing as I think men can, when it comes to pitching for investment,” she says. “And men are much better at dreaming really big in terms of revenue numbers.”
How can women get a leg up?
Lisa says she started SHE-com with women’s business education in mind, and she sees this as the key to tackling some of the biggest issues that women entrepreneurs face. Her venture has helped hundreds of women with everything from marketing to finance.
Another key issue for women that the founder has noticed is access to networking opportunities.
“Women traditionally don’t have the same circle or network as men do,” Lisa explains. “A lot of men come from corporate pathways, and if they launch a business, they still connect back into their friend group or corporate pathways.”
One of Lisa’s core priorities as a businesswoman is to connect other women and create wide-reaching and supportive professional networks. Her initiatives extend from business retreats to quasi-unions of women who negotiate opportunities with suppliers as collectives.
“Instead of walking the journey on our own and putting up with whatever offerings, whether it’s freight rates, credit cards, or a mobile plan, I believe I have an opportunity to amalgamate my community and represent them, almost as a form of a union, to negotiate better pricing and allow them access to something they wouldn’t get on their own,” Lisa explains.
Women can find power in numbers, but they can also find power in their own gendered experiences, the founder adds. From an anecdotal point of view, Lisa says she often sees women excel in particular in their multitasking and creative ideation.
“So women are amazing at problem solving their way to a product,” she says. “And I think women who are mums are also actually amazing at multitasking. I’m a much more capable person in business now as a mum than I was before I was a mum, because you have to be so good at adapting and multitasking.”
What’s changing for women?
Lisa sees a variety of opportunities and challenges emerging for women entrepreneurs. The rising cost of doing business, plus the pay-to-play nature of social media platforms, mean that it’s harder for women to launch eCommerce businesses now that it used to be, she says.
Cost-of-living struggles are also seeing women juggling their businesses alongside other responsibilities.
“Women are often trying to navigate a job and an eCommerce business and a family all at the same time, so that burnout rate is increasing,” explains Lisa.
Despite the challenges, there’s plenty to be positive about for the future. In particular, Lisa sees AI technologies as a “real bonus”, if women are capable of adapting quickly.
“AI has an enormous ability to make women more successful in business and to make marketing, in particular, much easier. The only problem, of course, is that they need to be open to that and adaptive at learning a new thing.”