The “femterprise revolution” is upon us, as if everyone didn’t already know.
“Lipstick entrepreneurs” are emerging from their beauty parlours and sleep deprived “mumpreneurs” are finally cleaning all that baby puke from their hair to become fully fledged “domestecutives”. Simply being in business is so 2009; new labels are the new black in 2010.
Future Laboratory, a “trends” consultancy, has been paid by the nice make-up people at Avon to come up with this ludicrous list of typologies.
It’s enough to make one mourn the passing of the “oh, so sensible” Noughties. Even Theresa May, the shadow women’s minister, has lent her support to the research.
Business woman Shaa Wasmund was among those forced to dispense with the New Year cheer and admit she’d been riled by such stereotyping: “I just wonder how men would feel if we coined a new phrase, like jockstrap entrepreneur,” she asks. Why stop there, Shaa? The five o’clock shadowpreneur, sounds a little dishevelled. And how about one for the new wave of building firms likely to emerge from the ashes of the construction crash: the bottom crackpreneurs.
None of this nonsense does any favours to women in business, who face all the same challenges that men do with a few more thrown in for good measure.
For instance, a study by the Economic and Social Research Council found that while banks do not deliberately discriminate against female customers their staff might well do so.
The study looked at the behaviour of 35 male and female loan officers at one unnamed national bank and discovered that some were asking questions like “What does your husband think of your plans?” Female staff were just as likely to make a distinction on gender as the men, the study found.
Such barriers combine with more long-standing structural ones like family responsibilities, the lack of adequate child care facilities and the tendency for women to set up in business sectors that require little upfront capital (and so are highly competitive), to create an issue that deserves better than silly name tags.
The Government has compounded the problem by paying lip service to these so-called lipstick entrepreneurs. Back in 2007 it appointed 1,000 women ambassadors across the country to act as mentors to budding female business owners. Lots of women volunteered, keen to help. The Business Department organised a glamorous lunch at St James’ Palace and many of the ambassadors travelled to London to take part.
Then nothing. Not a peep. The minister who sponsored the idea, Margaret Hodge, was moved on to another department, and it ended up in Sir Humphrey’s dusty filing cabinet. Despite all the rhetoric about the need to encourage more women to set up in business and to aspire to match the rates seen in the United States, nothing more was done.
Women-led businesses stand stubbornly at around 15pc of the total, little more than in 2003. Lindsay Jones, managing director of Cheltenham-based Spa PR, is among those ambassadors to feel frustrated: “We all went for lunch and that was it,” she says. People signed up, she adds, because it was a good idea. But there was no funding, not even to cover travel expenses and without any central organisation the idea died. Some of the ambassadors have gone on to organise their own events. “It’s driven by the determination of the individuals,” says Jones. “If people ask me I will try to help,” she adds, “It’s not because the Government has asked me to. It’s because I know how hard it is to set up in business.”
The 1,000 ambassadors became nine “regional champions” last November. The downsizing went unexplained – the Government decided it needed something to launch when accepting a fairly unambitious set of proposals from its Women’s Enterprise Taskforce, set up by Gordon Brown in 2007.
I hear that Angela Maxwell, who runs consultancy Acuwomen, is the first champion to be appointed. That anyone is still prepared to invest their time in such Government initiatives shows that the will to help others remains undiminished despite the disappointments. Perhaps, as a result, 2010 could be the year of the business mentor and not the typolical tormentor.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/
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