Entrepreneurship, a trait that is becoming a widely popularized skill that needs to be taught more whether you learn about it in college or if it’s being taught in high schools. Women every year gather for a week to learn about the tools and skills of entrepreneurship, Women Entrepreneur Week, an annual event that helps to provide education to female entrepreneurs by allowing them to attend workshops and panel discussions. Programs like these help to promote and support the female entrepreneurs, but they don’t reach hardly enough.
Female entrepreneurship needs to nurtured and fostered with different programs starting when they are young—teaching them the financial and business skills that they would need to venture out onto their own to create their own companies—fostering more opportunities for young women to have both hands-on and personal interactions with other female entrepreneurs.
As the world of female entrepreneurs grows in a global capacity, women still face changes every day when it comes to their journey of opening their own startup companies. In an article, Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship in the U.K, the report focused on issues that women have when it comes to starting their companies, with effects that happen to gain funding, and the availability of mentor programs that would help them to learn the ropes of entrepreneurship, along with an immense lack of professional networks.
This lack of support creates a vast divide in helping women start their companies and businesses out on stable foundations. It also creates heightened stress that could affect both health and wellbeing.
Business owner Jennifer Bett Meyer started her business and was in the industry for 12 years. She found herself asking what seemed like “elementary” questions such as how to get an accountant, and how to set up a business model. She did not feel that she had access to women’s founders, who could help her. Meyer set her sights on wanting to resolve these issues and making sure that her clients that she worked with would have access to an ecosystem of support.
Six years later, Meyer had partnered with Rebecca Minkoff, who was the founder of the Female Founder Collective, that helped to amplify what JBC was all about. They made access to support the growth of other female entrepreneurs that would help them to answer questions like what Meyer had when she first started. Meyer stated that traditional conferences focused on a sit and listen, model, whereas she wanted female entrepreneurs to have open conversations with each other. They called their event the “Wide Awake” and gave women access to tools to help them when it came to first start in business—discussing one of the most significant issues, funding.
For more on Jennifer, you can read her Forbes article to find out more about how she helps foster the journey of young female entrepreneurs.