Women Entrepreneurs, a Myth in the Indian Society

By siliconindia | Thursday, 12 May 2016, 06:55 Hrs

BENGALURU: Female entrepreneurs in Indian accounts for only 14 percent out of the total country’s 58.5 million entrepreneurs, notes the latest report of the Sixth Economic Census by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO). The women entrepreneurs are often neglected, as they tend to lack the capability to match up to the hard work put by men, the society believes.

It’s since several decades that the Indian entrepreneurship is known as a ‘masculine task’ by many. Due to this stereotypic thinking, women often lack the effort and motivation required for them to start and shine in the male dominated market. Additionally, gender gap and lack of institutional funding are also few of the many reasons behind the imbalanced entrepreneur society.

These 8.05 million ‘women led’ companies span various industries including corner shops and venture-funded startups. Among the many businesswomen, up to 1.08 million female entrepreneurs are from Tamil Nadu, followed by Kerala with 0.91 million and Andhra Pradesh consisting approximately 0.56 million business women. Most of these companies set-up by these women are small-scale and nearly 79 percent of them are self-financed, out of which only 4.4 percent women have borrowed money from a financial institution or have been assisted by the government.

A recently conducted study released by Dell reveals that the gender of an entrepreneur plays a crucial role when it comes to starting a business. The report illustrated that countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia has successfully acquired the top-most positions as the best countries for female entrepreneurs to start their venture, whereas, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India attains the bottom of the heap. The key reasons for being marked as a failure in developing women entrepreneurs are due to their partly divided attention between their household and office work, which is not to be seen in case of men.

However, to eradicate this issue and enable women entrepreneurs to flourish in the fast growing entrepreneur world, the ruling government of India, in its ‘Startup India’ plan has clearly stated to focus on growing the women entrepreneurs graph as compared to their male counterparts.