Answer
Women are confined to traditional roles like managing household, child care etc. Even if they wish to become entrepreneurs, it is not easy task. They face many constraints. There are some policy issues. There is a need to promote institutions and organisations to help women so that they may be able to take up newer roles. In order to become successful entrepreneurs, women need to focus their attention to business planning and management, which requires them to spare some time out of their traditional roles. Thus there is a need to support institutions engaged in child care, education, house-hold care, domestic care etc. There is also a need to promote better education and support for women. There are some issues which are as under for the governments in order to promote women entrepreneurs:
- Increase the ability of women to participate in the labour force by ensuring the availability of affordable child care and equal treatment in the work place. More generally, improving the position of women in society and promoting entrepreneurship generally will have benefits in terms of women’s entrepreneurship.
- Listen to the voice of w omen entrepreneurs. The creation of government offices of women’s business ownership is one way to facilitate this. Such offices could have programme responsibilities such as providing women’s business centres, organising information seminars and meetings and/or providing web-based information to those wanting to start and grow a business.
- Incorporate a women’s entrepreneurial dimension in the formation of all SME-related policies. This can be done by ensuring that the impact on women’s entrepreneurship is taken into account at the design stage.
- Promote the development of women entrepreneur networks. These are major sources of knowledge about women’s entrepreneurship and valuable tools for its development and promotion. Co-operation and partnerships between national and international networks can facilitate entrepreneurial endeavours by women in a global economy.
- Periodically evaluate the impact of any SME-related policies on the success of women-owned businesses and the extent to which such businesses take advantage of them. The objective should be to identify ways to improve the effectiveness of those that should be retained. Good practices that are identified in this way should be disseminated and shared internationally.
- Improve the factual and analytical underpinnings of our understanding of the role of women entrepreneurs in the economy. This requires strengthening the statistical basis for carrying out gender-related cross-country comparative analyses and longitudinal studies of the impact of important developments and policies, especially over time. Women entrepreneurs play an important role in the entrepreneurial economy, both in their ability to create jobs for themselves and to create jobs for others. In Europe (both European Union countries and other European countries), estimates indicate that there exist more than 10 million self-employed women. In the United States 6.4 million self-employed women provide employment for 9.2 million people and create significant sales. It is also observed that women still represent a minority of those that start new firms, are self-employed, or are small business owner-managers.
