Building Success While Tearing Down Barriers

so

my name is roberto and my idea was

sharing today is the power of female

entrepreneurs

to tear down barriers for building

success

it’s often been said that women are the

most underutilized asset in the world

studies have shown that the economic

inclusion of women can spread

overall economic growth and help

families and children

communities and even nations but still

women face

a range of challenges but still women

face a range of challenges to keep them

from

being fully productive members of

society women are often

over represented in the least paid most

insecure

most vulnerable jobs and even then women

are still

unemployment for women are still six

percent higher than for men

entrepreneurship works as an important

means for women to empower themselves

and define their own economic prosperity

women who

women whether they want to be um

whether they have discovered the

opportunity that they

that they thought needs a meeting or

whether they want to

have more control over their working

hours um entrepreneurship

the impact is substantial according to

the boston consulting group

if men and women were to partake in

entrepreneurship equally

global gdp could rise for as much as 1.5

trillion dollars

but still men have an easy time being

entrepreneurs than women and this is due

to

a variety of this is due to a variety of

complex

and varied reasons be it from

human capital and social

capital they just cannot access here and

also implicit biases that they have to

work with

although forty percent of new startups

in the us

are lab women and china twenty percent

of new businesses

are earned by women and developing

wealth that number is between

40 to 50 percent but even though

40 of new startups in the us are led by

women

the total venture capital funding in

2017 that went to women-led startups

is only two percent and that is a number

that it’s grim

and that is the number we can change

according to dr dana keynes

men founders tend to get promotional

questions or

what could go right they tend to get

questions such as

how many customers are you expecting to

get over the next few years

how much are you expecting to grow over

the next few years whereas women

get preventive questions or what could

go wrong

we get questions such as how are you

going to retain the customers that you

already have

and when you have promotional questions

you tend to get promotional answers

we have preventive questions you tend to

give preventive answers which leads

investors to relate men led startups to

prosperity and growth

and women-led startups to stagnation

the implicit bias that we have

comes from a very long line of a very

long history of

development there’s several tried

techniques to try to remove this

implicit bias that we might have in our

heads

such as showing counter stereotypical

examples

or just really encouraging oneself to

not feel

that implicit bias but this techniques

might work immediately

but they do not have a lasting effect

our brains the

the way our brains form associations and

acquire them from a cultural environment

developed over a long period of time

most of which humans lived in an

environment that was logically

consistent

um due it was unlikely that our brains

ever had to

unlearn an association that was already

made because we lived in places that

just didn’t change

and so our brains never developed like a

method for it to unlearn an association

that was already done

but there is a technique that we can do

that exists

that removes all implicit bias from the

equation and it’s called

discretion elimination so when you make

an objective judgment with discrepancies

with with those questions i’m sorry

there tends to be unintended

discrepancies

so even if you really encourage yourself

to not feel implicit bias

something in the back of head that you

might have no control over might sway

your opinion

there is a reality show that’s quite

popular that has integrated this

technique into its format

and it’s very popular you might you

might have heard of it it’s called the

voice

so in the voice um they have four judges

they’re sitting in chess facing away

from the talent and this is something

that they also do in orchestras

around the world they have the judges uh

they have the

performers sitting behind a curtain

where you can’t see them

and so the judges only get to hear the

voices the performance the talents and

they do not get to be

swayed by whatever unintended

discrepancy some idea

from uh the way a person looks their

height

how beautiful they are or whatever it is

there

this is a an area of active study and

there’s still a lot that can be done to

improve on this

a lot of people are trying to innovate

in this regard by implementing

implementing artificial intelligence to

remove all subjective judgment from

areas and industries that would benefit

from objective judgments

but it matters a lot who gets to

regulate this

objective judgment and so this takes you

to my next point

and it is that our society

uh markets and conditions technology

to men three-quarters of all tech roles

are

are taken by men and the image isn’t a

lot better in the business world

where women tend to be reluctant to

either start a tech startup or to

implement tech into their existing

startups as a matter of fact

through all out of all the businesses

that exist in silicon valley actually

only three percent of them belong to

women

that is a number that can be improved

and that is because

from a very young age we condition

technology to not

feel familiar to women and so oftentimes

what happens is that women founders feel

like

tech just isn’t for them or it might be

something so foreign that it might be a

bit scary but this is not

how it should be this is not what it

could be um

from a very young age we give boys we we

put boys in an environment

uh that’s surrounded by tech we make

techs feel familiar to them by giving

them

uh toys such as robots or consoles we

give them

career prospects in stem we make it an

availability to them we tell them that

they can be engineers

astronauts and we create a stereotype in

our in our society

that men just naturally gravitate more

towards math and science

and girls do not which is something that

just isn’t true

and it’s something that we can change we

can challenge we can challenge negative

stereotypes

we can uh we have to adapt and

improve our education to make tech more

familiar

and available to young girls we could

champion

role models uh such as women that took

on

and conquered tech such as the

cr of ibm ginny romte

or the character founder of htc chair

wang

we can make ted we can make stem seem

like an available career choice

for young girls everywhere

but tech isn’t the only place where

the human capital for business for

female business owners

is lacking we also have to adapt the way

that we

uh promote business to young girls

and young women everywhere when you say

the word and

you might think of something someone

like bill gates or jeff bezos or mark

zuckerberg

and even if you think after a little

while you might finally think of

uh oprah winfrey in addition to literal

association

the words that we used to define

entrepreneur such as

risk-taking and aggressive are also

worth their society

relates to men so a risk-taking

aggressive men

might be seen as confident or passionate

a risk-taking aggressive woman

might be seen as pushy or unlikable

so but luckily there is luckily there’s

a new trend in entrepreneurship

that bursts well with gender equality

and this is

social entrepreneurship so social

entrepreneurship

is where you have a social mission

alongside a revenue model

so you might have heard of tom shoes

which is

a social entrepreneurship that is led by

a man but have you heard of mary kimberl

american pedo is a painting sierra and

founder of undercover boots

sophie is the guard mary thought it was

quite odd

been in a country where it rains seven

months out of the year it was

so difficult to find a pair of good

rainbows it was like finding a needle in

a haystack

and so six years ago she studied

undercover boots as a way to not only

create

good rain boots but also as a way to

give back to society

so she she worked around the concept of

give back to her

exploit and so her social mission

helps the protect the environment helps

protect animals and children in need

and now mary sells it over 50 countries

all the way from panama to morrison

beach

food ceredon to indonesia

or you might have heard of los mendoza

luz created this app called emmunia

which helps

families all over the country keep track

of the vaccines

she’s helped thousands of people uh

from getting preventable diseases but

just keeping track

of their vaccine schedules and so before

emuni luz had nerve business knowledge

she was a nurse and she thought the

business world had no interest in her

but her social mission had her diving

deep into marketing tactics

and accounting spreadsheets and that is

the key

when it’s more than just economic

profits women sign

up if the content of the work itself

is made more societally meaningful women

will enroll

in droves and the statistics and

entrepreneurship

back this up women are seventeen percent

more likely

to side a social enterprise than men

and so the answer is clear one way to

that we can

use to produce the gender gap is making

it easier and more accessible

to start and sustain our social

enterprise

as customers we have the power to vote

with our dollars

we can consume goods and services they

have a social mission

and as investors we could create funds

that help and grow and sustain social

enterprises at the seed

angel and venture capital level

from the city of knowledge foundation

and through our canadian presidents

program

we have helped thousands of female

entrepreneurs by training them

and working alongside them and even

though we give them all the human

and financial capital they need after

the program whenever we ask them what

was most important to them from the

program every single time they say the

same thing

it was the network of fellow business

women that worked alongside me

and the mentorship from successful

business women that helped me

grow and so working alongside these

women they created groups and together

the innovative problems they didn’t even

know they had

they reached new markets that they

couldn’t have done before and they all

increased net worth each one of them by

at least double

and so you could say that when gruesome

people when groups of women

work together they they’re unstoppable

or one could say limitless

and so we are

we have gone to where we are thanks to

visionary

men and women people have thought of

more egalitarian well

and so we already to ourselves we are to

ourselves to give our children and our

grandchildren

a more fair and equal world and you

might think

you can’t change the world but you can

change your world you can change your

life

and i want to encourage you to do that

because the future isn’t somewhere

you’re going to

the future is something you create

thanks for coming in ted talk