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MILLENNIALS, THE STARTUPS ECOSYSTEM, WAYRA

By Sharon Pickford, @sharonpickford, European COO for Wayra and overall champion of Girls, Ladies, Mothers and Grandmothers in digital businesses.

18 February 2014: I watched the film ‘Made in Dagenham’ a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about the battle for equal pay in a Ford factory in the 1950’s. It’s the second time I’ve seen it and both times I have come away feeling a little bit disappointed in my generation.

I was born in the 70’s, it’s not a particularly memorable generation. We lived through and were able to celebrate a new millennium, that’s about it. We haven’t been part of any significant revolution, We didn’t campaign to win the rights for Women to vote, We haven’t valiantly fought to equal women’s pay with their male counterparts, in fact we’ve simply floated through and taken for granted the things that women in the past have trail blazed for us.

What’s easy to forget is that these Dagenham Women probably didn’t know they were changing the world so radically; that women like me, nearly 65 years later, would find it almost unbelievable that there ever existed a time when women weren’t paid the same as men.

I watched it the second time with my 12 year old daughter and she actually asked me ‘is this made up?’ It made me wonder about what are we living through now – will I one day get asked by my grand-daughter ‘that can’t be true can it?’

I attended an event on Tuesday 11 Feb at Wayra – a remarkable women’s event hosted by Wayra UK and @ChukaUmunna – Shadow Business Secretary. It was aimed at showcasing the wonderful, talented women who set up and run their own businesses in the UK. Sounds very reasonable so far. Surely there are loads of women doing this? Apparently not. There is a massive drop off when it comes to women setting up and running their own businesses. Particularly in the digital technology space. So why is this and what can we do about it?

According to Forbes – 35% of all start-ups are founded by women, this number drops to an incredible low of 5% of all DIGITAL start-ups being founded by women. Admittedly these stats are from 2012, but there is little to showcase any significant movement upwards since then.

@AllyMaughan, CEO of People Puzzles has a view on this – she thinks women are discouraged at an early age. They have to make choices much earlier than men and that commitment creates a barrier to entry. Some of the commitment is family. Rather than embracing an ‘expanding’ founder, investors see this as a reason not to invest and here they can get very intimate with their questions. @BeckyDowning1, CEO of BuzzMove was recently asked at an investment round ‘what her intentions on starting a family were’ – I’d put good money on the fact that question would never be put to a male founder.

There are other hurdles too, the lack of motivation for embracing technology for girls in school. Are we setting good guidelines and principles with which to inspire our young girls to take up tech as a career, or do they, like my 12 year old daughter, see it within the spectrum of a small, rather sweaty room, made up of testosterone fuelled boys shouting into headsets?

Do we have any great role models to drop into conversation – where are the female equivalents of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos that we can use to inspire our young daughters?

Running your own business takes determination, resilience and character. Women are naturally able to connect with people, build long-lasting collaborative relationships, they are better at supporting each other, creating successful communities and reaching out for help and advice when needed.

What I’ve seen from the female founders across Wayra Europe is a wonderful ability to keep trying, patience to give things time to grow and develop, yet no resistance to changing things when needed and a determination to make it work if at first it doesn’t succeed.

All of these are core attributes needed when running a business. Imagine a digital world where the source code is open, and the business model is open too – joining businesses together to create joined up experiences, joined up data, joined up intelligence – this is surely the next wave to hit our digital revolution?

Digital entrepreneurialism is especially relevant to, and accommodating of, the lives and demands faced by modern working women – especially those with dependencies. ‘Digital’ operates without geographic or chronological constraint. That can be dangerous in that digital can completely dominate and intrude into your life if you allow it. However, if you can control it, then the attributes that are unique to digital can be used to people’s advantage – especially women.

And so, if approached intelligently, there has never been a better time than now to unleash the entrepreneurial potential of women.

It’s not going to be easy, there are prejudices and long harboured belief systems we’ll have to overcome, we’ll need a fearless female leader to rally behind, we’ll need to distil our requirements down to a distinctive, unified shout, we’ll need to rally. In fact, perhaps it’s time my generation had a revolution after all?

Any woman looking to get help in their digital start up business can apply right now to Wayra UK for a space in their Academy www.wayra.org