How can we men make the spaces of the entrepreneurship ecosystem much more inclusive places?
Like many other professional spaces, the entrepreneurship ecosystem in the world is a place dominated mostly by men. And although, sometimes, it makes us uncomfortable to talk about this, it is necessary to continue doing it while it happens because, the truth is that the data is there to show us an unfair (aren’t it all?) inequality.
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One of the latest mappings done in Spain shows us that 6 de 10 startups are founded by only men, while of the 4 remaining 3 They are mixed and only one startup is founded by only women. If we look at the investment data, the same thing happens: according to Innpactia, in the 2023 only the 5 % of the investment resources were intended for only women and the 25 % They went to companies with women in management positions. The rest of the cake goes to the men.
The irony of all this is that both the IDB and many other institutions agree that Businesses led by women are much more successful than those led by menboth in the lifespan of the companies themselves and in the growth of sales compared to companies led by men.
We cannot excuse ourselves from The gender gap between women and men in the ecosystem is due to an issue of management skillssoft techniques that favor men, since The information available will tell us that women perform much better.
It is not the purpose of this column to find the causes of why this occurs, rather what it seeks is to propose a series of recommendations for us men who are relevant decision makers in the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Colombia, so that we really do something, instead of staying with our arms crossed.
Anecdotally, it caught my attention how a man with relevance in the ecosystem, with genuine concern, showed data where around 15% of startups founded in LATAM had women on the founding team. In addition, given the shocking data, he openly asked: what can we do? However, the curious thing about the topic is that a week later that same person held an event where despite having multiple speakers, only two were women.
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The purpose of telling this anonymous anecdote is to show how difficult it is for us men to be able to identify the biases and privilege we have for the simple reason of being men in a world that is designed precisely so that we can exercise power ourselves.
In the previous column I shared how with a group of leaders, quite diverse and transformative, we learned about intrinsic relationship between leadership, power and expectations What people who are led have about who they lead.
Among these people is La Mija, founder of La Mija Café, a patch shop (in her own words) that seeks to close inequality gaps between men and women in coffee growing. It does this by helping to market coffees at fair prices, produced mostly by women. For a week, La Mija shared with us a delicious Geisha coffee, produced by Lina Quintero from Gigante, Huila. But perhaps his most significant gift was a 2009 article called “Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change…and others socialized in a society based on domination,” written by Chris Crass, which seeks to provide practical recommendations. so that we men are not only aware of our dominant position but that we do something about it.
I wanted to emulate this exercise a little and, therefore, in this column I would like to share some actions that can help us make entrepreneurship ecosystems more inclusive and diverse, and that hopefully these actions will lead to closing the inequality gaps mentioned in the first paragraphs:
- More participation of women in panels: a very simple action is to end so much “handle” as the all-male panels are known. If you hold an event, make sure that at least half of the speakers are women. If you are invited to a panel, ask who else is participating, if there are no women, demand that those organizing the event invite women to your panel, and if they say no because there are already many participants (it has happened to me), then give in. your place on the panel for a woman to occupy.
NOTE: a panel where women are only moderators is not an inclusive panel, it is just a trap that we unconsciously build to return to our comfort zone where women ask and men answer.
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Nor is it an inclusive event where all the panels are mostly men but there is one where they are all women and the topic is “The role of women in the entrepreneurship ecosystem.” Women are not only there to talk about their roles in the ecosystem, women are there to talk about all topics and therefore, like us men, they must have the same spaces for participation.
- More participation of women in meetings: It is no surprise to anyone if I tell you that in work meetings men tend to talk more than women. A very simple exercise to count the time of a meeting in which men speak as opposed to the time that women speak will surprise us. There are also studies that show how after the pandemic and with the growth of virtual meetings, men are more likely to turn on the microphone and speak without asking to speak while women tend to use the raise hand button more. Raise awareness about this factor and that will allow you to realize that some voices that we almost never hear have important ideas for a startup or an entity in the ecosystem.
- Check how many women are in a meeting: Maybe you don’t notice it easily now, suddenly you haven’t wondered about it before, but it’s possible that most of your meetings are captured primarily by men. Be more aware of this situation and try to invite more and more women to this space in the near future. Sometimes something as basic as asking can make a difference.
- More women in management positions: Many of the programs have models of mock boards of directors or advisory boards. It is possible to build boards where at least half of them are women. There is always the excuse that “there are not enough women in those roles” but again that is the internal voice that wants to keep us in the comfort zone. It is not true that there are no women in management positions, in fact at Pantera Makers since 2020 all our programs that have these types of roles have this policy of at least 50% women on advisory boards. For many years we sold this as a differential, we believe that it should no longer be that way, it should be the norm, the standard.
- Read more women: or if you don’t like reading, consume more valuable content created by women. In 2019 I did a simple exercise: I counted how many books by women writers were in my library. I realized that for every 50 books there were three written by women. At no point in my youth did I explicitly say “I’m going to read only men, I’m not interested in reading women”, machismo does not operate like that in 99% of people. Once again, these anecdotes, although painful, demonstrate how complex it is to fight against our own biases. The most difficult thing about these is that they are invisible to us and that is why the first step to reduce or eliminate them is to recognize them and do something. In 2020 during the pandemic I only read women and since 2021 at least half of the books I read are written by women. Did I eliminate the bias? Not at all, in fact for me it is still an exercise that I have to do supremely consciously, if I don’t rationalize it I fear that I would return to reading mostly men.
- Don’t reproduce stereotypes: If anything is proven, it is that in the world of managerial tasks there is no advantage or disadvantage between one gender or another, therefore reproducing stereotypes such as “women are more conservative and men more risky” or “women are very emotional and more rational men” are simply not only false but are counterproductive for women to reach positions of power in the ecosystem.
- Pay or promote equal pay policies in the same roles: Finally, one of the ways we can make immediate changes is by reviewing and adjusting our salary or fee payment policies between men and women. Today, men are paid 10% more than women when we do the same work or are in equal positions. That is a gap that should not exist in less than half a decade.
- Comply with the 7 recommendations without condescension: We believe that complying with these things is correct and fair, we do not seek approval or validation with these actions, nor should we do it to pose as men who save women, much less, let us remember that at the end of everything on this path for equality gender our role is not intended to be leading.
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Surely there are many more things that men can do to make the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Colombia much more diverse. I am aware that perhaps this column has a fairly binary view of gender, I also recognize that it does not take into account other factors such as ethnic diversity, people’s skin color, or income levels. It simply seeks to contribute to the discussion from one angle because only when we make our ecosystem a more diverse space can we truly unleash the potential of our organizations and make this country a richer place and at the same time more inclusive and safe for all people.
2024-03-15 10:42:00