Women In Entrepreneurship | LEADING CHANGE

Join CWB partner Sobey Women In Business for this conference.  Learn, hear from diverse voices and actively participate in workshopping solutions to boost and improve the representation of women and diverse voices in entrepreneurship and small business.

2021 Theme: Leading Change

The challenges of past year have clearly highlighted and reinforced the importance of supporting women’s entrepreneurship, as the global economy tries to recalibrate, “build back better” and recover from COVID-19.

While all entrepreneurs face challenges, women entrepreneurs need to break even more barriers due to an unequal system. Gender inequality is a global issue. Today, only one in three businesses are owned by women (The World Bank Gender Data Portal, 2020). Empowering women drives inclusive economic growth. According to the International Monetary Fund, 90 percent of income made by female entrepreneurs is distributed to their families and communities.

According to Women in the Digital Age, “during an experiment in which two entrepreneurial pitch videos with randomly assigned voices were watched, 68.3 percent of participants preferred to invest in ventures pitched by a male voice even though these voices presented identical pitches.” Additionally, YouGov’s 2016 survey found that 13 percent of 16-22 year old women with an idea for a startup said a lack of role models is a barrier to setting up a business, compared to only 7 percent of young men. It is clear that women entrepreneurs continue to face barriers to success.

Now is the time to focus on women’s entrepreneurship to discover and uncover ways to support  these entrepreneurs and strengthen the social fabric of our communities.

Goals for Women in Business 2021

We hope all Women in Business attendees leave with new tools to empower them to lead change in the world of small business and entrepreneurship.

Some specific goals for the day include:

facilitating new mentoring and mutually supportive relationships
co-creating new language that includes and welcomes
identifying specific tactics for women in small business and entrepreneurship to overcome invisible barriers
learning ways to use the tools of the industry to increase corporate social responsibility.