Women in Positions of Power
Addressing the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence is often framed as a good in itself. And, of course, it is. It is a matter of justice that women have an equal chance of success as their equally qualified male colleagues. But female representation is about more than a specific woman who does or doesn’t get a job, because female representation is also about the gender data gap. There will be certain female needs men won’t think to cater for because they relate to experiences that men simply won’t have. And it’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.
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Dr Tania Boler, founder of women’s health tech company Chiaro, thinks that the reluctance to back female-led companies is partly a result of the ‘stereotype that men like great design and great tech and women don’t’. But is this stereotype based in reality, or is it possible that the problem isn’t tech-blind women so much as woman-blind tech, created by a woman-blind tech industry and funded by woman-blind investors?
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Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue. For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male- owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents.
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This may be partly because women are ‘better suited for leadership than men’. That was the conclusion of a study conducted by BI Norwegian Business School, which identified the five key traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and conscientiousness) of a successful leader. Women scored higher than men in four out of the five. But it may also be because the women who do manage to make it through are filling a gender data gap: studies have repeatedly found that the more diverse a company’s leadership is, the more innovative
they are. This could be because women are just innately more innovative – but more likely is that the presence of diverse perspectives makes businesses better informed about their customers. Certainly, innovation is strongly linked to financial performance.
And when it comes to consumer electronics for women, Boler says, innovation has been sorely lacking. ‘There’s never been much innovation in consumer electronics for women,’ she says. ‘It’s always focused on a very superficial aesthetic level: turn something pink, or turn something into a piece of jewellery, rather than taking account of the fact that technology can solve real problems for women.’ The result has been a chronic lack of investment, meaning that ‘the actual technology that’s used in medical devices for women is sort of a kickback from the 1980s’.