SA women account for among the fewest global female business leaders
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August 26 marks Women’s Equality Day, which focuses on forging a gender-equal world, celebrating women’s successes and raising awareness of historical and present bias. There’s a lot of discussion at present about women in the workplace and under-representation in industry — 5% of US ownership in the tech industry is women, and only 2.9% of black women study STEM-related bachelor’s degrees across the world.
This raises the question: what about women in business? It seems that more women are turning to business than ever before. Surprisingly, when considering statistics across other international industries, the global number of female entrepreneurs has grown more than 10% each year. According to Karen Quintos, chief customer officer at Dell, women are equally as likely or more likely to start a business as men.
But do the reasons for this reflect general bias and inequality for those not self-employed in comparison to their male counterparts? According to a 2018 report reasons included the fact that women are often primary caregivers and need more flexibility for either their young children or ageing parents, to charge their own rates and handle their own online accounting to overcome the gender pay gap, and to escape the glass ceiling that is having promotions passed over them in favour of male colleagues.
If we were asked to guess which country had the highest proportion of female business leaders we’d probably guess a progressive Scandinavian country such as Denmark or Norway. In fact Ghana, West Africa, is the highest, with women owning 46.4% of all businesses in 2018. According to reports from the World Bank, Africa has the highest proportion of female entrepreneurs in the world at 27%, followed closely by Europe at 24% and Asia Pacific at 13%.
However, at the bottom of the continent, SA women remain in the minority of global female business leaders — over half of the SA population comprises women, yet only 18.8% of businesses are owned by women, unaligned with the global rates. Why the gender gap? First, an exploration into women in business in Africa found that most women and young people in SA are unemployed and living in poverty, therefore some are compelled to choose self-employment in micro-enterprise projects such as chicken farming or sewing.
Second, research has found that women struggle to gain funding from banks for their business ideas, with the financing gap for women in Sub-Saharan Africa being more ...
This raises the question: what about women in business? It seems that more women are turning to business than ever before. Surprisingly, when considering statistics across other international industries, the global number of female entrepreneurs has grown more than 10% each year. According to Karen Quintos, chief customer officer at Dell, women are equally as likely or more likely to start a business as men.
But do the reasons for this reflect general bias and inequality for those not self-employed in comparison to their male counterparts? According to a 2018 report reasons included the fact that women are often primary caregivers and need more flexibility for either their young children or ageing parents, to charge their own rates and handle their own online accounting to overcome the gender pay gap, and to escape the glass ceiling that is having promotions passed over them in favour of male colleagues.
If we were asked to guess which country had the highest proportion of female business leaders we’d probably guess a progressive Scandinavian country such as Denmark or Norway. In fact Ghana, West Africa, is the highest, with women owning 46.4% of all businesses in 2018. According to reports from the World Bank, Africa has the highest proportion of female entrepreneurs in the world at 27%, followed closely by Europe at 24% and Asia Pacific at 13%.
However, at the bottom of the continent, SA women remain in the minority of global female business leaders — over half of the SA population comprises women, yet only 18.8% of businesses are owned by women, unaligned with the global rates. Why the gender gap? First, an exploration into women in business in Africa found that most women and young people in SA are unemployed and living in poverty, therefore some are compelled to choose self-employment in micro-enterprise projects such as chicken farming or sewing.
Second, research has found that women struggle to gain funding from banks for their business ideas, with the financing gap for women in Sub-Saharan Africa being more ...
