5 Insights From Women in Business on Closing the Gender Gap

Back in 2010, an article in Harvard Business Review was making the headlines proclaiming that the biggest emerging market in the world was women. Today, the statement still holds.?

With 132 years left until the gender gap is supposedly closed, women have a long way to go to fight stereotypes and promote feminine values in leadership positions and across sectors traditionally dominated by men.?

A ray of hope, however, shines through: gender stereotypes have started to change and the unique value women can bring to business, science, tech, industry, and politics is gaining recognition. Slowly, but steadily, we are reporting some progress.

On Tuesday, around 500 people gathered at the Romanian-American University to discuss both challenges and achievements for Women in Business, during the second edition of La French Tech’s eponymous conference.

Our Irina Obushtarova also took the stage to moderate a panel about the impact of gender-balanced startup teams on business and society.

5 Takeaways from Women in Business

#1 It will take another 136 years to close the global gender gap.

The estimate by the World Economic Forum paints a gloomy image of the progress we’ve achieved since we are tackling gender inequality. It seems that we are going backwards.

What it shows is how tough the challenge of closing the gender gap around the world truly is. While we can see some progress in education and health, the largest component - economic inequality - has been increasing post-Covid. Male annual earnings continue to outpace those of female professionals.?

#2 Why are we so far away? There are several disconnects.

The gender gap persists unabated mainly because business leaders continue to be decoupled from the grassroots level, shared Ana-Maria Voicu Domsa, Partner at EY. Here are some of the disconnects:

• The reality and the data disconnect - Business leaders tend to assume that the gender gap issue is nearly solved, with so many initiatives promoted left and right. This confusion happens partly because of the lack of data showing the progress of women in the workplace.
• The pipeline disconnect - Organizations aren’t creating pipelines for future female leaders. Promoting opportunities for women to aspire to and reach for leadership positions is necessary to help close the gaps.??
• The perception disconnect - Men and women don’t see the same issue in the same way. As panel participant Diana Florescu, founder of mediaforgrowth and Partner at Wolves Summit, was sharing: without more women in leadership positions, we can hardly see the problems that women face.

#3 In the tech world, women founders are facing a lot of visible and invisible biases.

Irina Obushtarova introduced the startup-focused panel by stating a dire fact: female founders have raised 1% of the venture capital investments in Europe, in 2021. In 2022, the percentage went even lower to 0.9%.

After pitching to 100 VCs and getting two of them Xenia Muntean, founder of Planable, says a lot of these biases are not visible, blatant, so you are not able to pinpoint them, which makes the challenge tougher to address.

Diana Florescu further highlighted that investor teams are gender unbalanced themselves. Only 15% of GPs are women. Without diversity among investors, there is more room left for gender biases influencing investment decisions.?

Iulia Dorobantu from Charger.ro, for example, attributes a lot of their fundraising success to the support they received in the process from the Bravva Angels group of women angels investors.

#4 This is what we are missing out by overlooking women founders.

What not all leaders may realize is that we are missing out on a sea of opportunities to improve business practices and outcomes by neglecting the role of women. It’s not a man’s world to which women must adapt to or be left out, that would miss the point.

As Irina points out, women-founded startups should make sense from a purely financial point: despite receiving a lower share of venture capital, women delivered twice as much revenue per dollar.

We see it first hand in Anouk’s story of how she founded Librea, a sustainable feminine hygiene care company. She was looking for a good job where she could be useful, when she tried a period underwear product in France and had a feeling it was a revolution for women everywhere.

So she decided to bring it to market in Romania and make it available to more women looking for healthy and sustainable feminine care. But sustainability-focused companies may need more patience and dedication in the long-term. As she puts it, doing things right is what gives her energy to keep it going.

#5 Everyone has responsibility for improving opportunities for underprivileged women.

As Shibu Nambiar, COO EMEA & Americas at Genpact, pointed out during a panel discussion, we must not forget the importance of working together to improve opportunities for women in disadvantaged communities.?

Around the world, women are more likely to face structural problems such as poverty, lack of education, and lack of appropriate childcare, as well as human rights violations such as forced marriage. Doing our best from our respective positions to help tackle some of these challenges is as important as promoting women in leadership positions - the two goals can, in fact, strengthen each other.