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