Women entrepreneurship: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Even though women entrepreneurship is recognised as important to economic growth, woman entrepreneurs are a minority. While entrepreneurship quite challenging, women entrepreneurship is even more so due to the gender-based discrimination that they face (property and inheritance laws, orthodox culture). Lately, governments across the world (including India) as well as various developmental organizations are actively undertaking promotion of women entrepreneurs through various schemes, incentives, and promotional measures. It is believed that they can make strong contribution to the economy due to their role in families and communities. The added benefit of women entrepreneurship is that it leads to women empowerment. Women needn’t compete with men or look for support in starting their enterprises. Women possess a natural advantage in a few areas and must utilize these to start their own enterprises. They should not focus on competing for mainstream jobs and identify and leverage their own skill set so as to become an entrepreneur and at the same time handle her family responsibilities ably. Entrepreneurship provides the perfect opportunity for both empowerment and time management and a woman can create a balance for herself in her personal and professional life through this route of self-employment. The biggest advantage of such a natural skill-based entrepreneurship would be the ability to scale up by employing other women who may possess a similar skill set. Having a natural advantage translates into premium payments. This is especially true for services. For example, one can pay anywhere from Rs 50 to Rs 1000 for a simple haircut. Such is the power of differentiation for a similar service purely based on the expertise and the natural talent of the service provider. But at the same time, it must be remembered that the most important thing in establishing superiority of the product offering is communicating and publicising the same. This can be achieved through word-of-mouth publicity, dedicated websites and testimonials by celebrities etc. Networking is very important here as only through long term relations with customers can real differentiation and communication of the same be achieved. Through this report we aim to identify to those specific areas where a woman has a natural advantage and can be made into a commercially successful enterprise. Then we go on to describe the required skill set, the possible business idea and finally list existing examples from which inspiration can be obtained.