On the eve of International Women’s Day, The Studio, the not-for-profit media and creative tech start-up hub, yesterday launched The Studio Women’s Network to boost the number of female founders of start-ups.
According to Chantal Abouchar, The Studio’s founder and CEO, the low rate of female participation in media and creative tech start-ups should be significantly improved.
“Women account for 58 per cent of employment in media, yet only 17 per cent of our founders are female. Our women’s network is designed to provide the support to budding female media and creative tech talent to help them found and grow great companies,” Ms Abouchar said.
“The Studio has an opportunity to encourage and foster women’s participation in these creative start-ups. We know that cities like New York have higher rates of participation due to their media and creative industries focus. The Studio can do the same in Australia.”
The Studio Women’s Network will hold quarterly events. In 2019, the focus is on female founders from the Asian region. The soon-to-be-announced program will feature successful high growth female tech founders and a series of curated events.
“Shining a spotlight on female founders, providing role models, celebrating success and creating networks are essential to increase female participation in technology and start-ups.
“Australia has already produced some fantastic media and creative tech female founders, including Cyan Ta’eed from Envato and Melanie Perkins from Canva and media leaders such Ita Buttrose, soon to be the ABC Chair. But we can do so much more. This network is about opening up this opportunity,” Ms Abouchar explained.
Lynda Coker, from Scale Investors said, “Women are the minority in tech but there are legacy reasons for this. We need to support, invest and incentivize women to become leaders in tech. Women bring domain experience and different thought leadership which enhances decision making and can lead to better comes.”
Rebecca Pirrie, Co-Founder of start-up OIS, said, “Being able to navigate and knowledge share with other females in the tech space is hugely valuable. Having a female perspective adds immensely to our business and clients.”
Research shows that diversity of teams, leads to more successful outcomes and diverse teams out-perform those that are not diverse. And for a start-up this can make or break their success as they grow and try to gain traction.
Studio resident Allison Reid from Equal Reality, a virtual reality start-up focused on inclusion and diversity training, said,” The value of your network is very important. Surrounding yourself with people who are honest and at different stages is so valuable. The opportunity cost of doing it alone is enormous and it’s great to have an office to go to like The Studio and people and a community to interact with on a daily basis.”
Current Studio resident and three times start-up founder, Deborah Fairfull from Blisspot said, “Women have unique challenges as start-ups in terms of funding, time management and the way we naturally present ourselves may not be the way investors want to hear. We need to learn new skills to unlock investment and when we come together we can develop these and realise we have common challenges.”
