08/29/2023 – 7:58 am
The number of women business owners in Brazil reached 10.3 million in 2022, according to the Empreendedorismo Feminino survey. Women represented 34.4% of the universe of business owners in the country, very close to the record of 34.8%, verified in 2019.
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The data comes from a survey by the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (Sebrae), crossed with information from the IBGE. However, despite leading in numbers, women entrepreneurs deal with more obstacles in creating and managing their businesses. This is what speakers at the Startup Summit 2023 are debating, an event held in Florianópolis (SC), with the support of Sebrae, which brought together almost 40,000 participants in three days.
Sebrae’s National Coordinator of Female Entrepreneurship, Renata Malheiros, spoke with entrepreneurs on the panel ‘Women and leadership: how to overcome obstacles and prosper’. According to Renata, acting in networks is the greatest solution to cultural problems involving work overload for women and management difficulties.
Entrepreneurial women, according to Sebrae surveys, dedicate 17% fewer hours to their businesses than entrepreneurial men. And the IBGE shows us that women dedicate twice as many hours to domestic tasks than men.
“How can we dedicate ourselves to our companies if we don’t have the time or energy due to the overload of work? When we are in networks, and these are the main antidote to this cultural issue, we discover that we can and should talk about having a better division of tasks at home, we can and should demand more public policies, such as day care centers, transport, nutrition to take this burden off women’s shoulders”, she explains.
“The price of these beliefs is the woman’s mental health and her not chasing her dreams. The first thing is to be aware that no one is free from these stereotypes. You look at yourself and wonder if you’re reproducing. Networking and suggesting solutions: this is the way to change”, says Renata.
Accompanying Renata’s speech and also in the programming of the event on stage with the theme ‘From Problem to Solution: Impact Startups as responses to social challenges’, Karine Oliveira, creator of Wakanda Educação, an educational startup in Salvador (BA), reinforced the speech from a colleague about the performance of women in networks.
“Leadership we already have. If we stop to think about it, it’s not in the midst of startups, but as women, we represent the majority of business leaders. The problem is, why aren’t these deals as big? Why aren’t big companies? We have women at the head of businesses, but when we look at revenues, compared to other companies, we disappear; we show up at the head of small businesses and in businesses out of necessity,” she explains.
“What we can do, thinking about leadership in technology solutions, is how do we redistribute investments: how many public notices, how many training courses, how many specific events so that we deal with money in the hands of these people. Having specific categories to invest in female leaders, as they need to develop. We already exist, we are already here”, says Karine. Baiana, she made the list Forbes Under 30 in 2021, and has work done by and for black women.
For Hellym Ribeiro, manager of Zoho for Startups in Brazil, female leadership can increase the company’s chance of profitability. “However, we realize that investments and financial support for startups that are founded by women pose challenges in leveraging their businesses. If on the one hand, there are challenges, on the other hand, we see an increase in initiatives aimed at female entrepreneurship with the aim of training, educating, accelerating and investing financially in startups founded by women ”, she concludes.
Governance and racial equity
Racial equity was also debated on the Startup Summit stage on the third day of the meeting. Guibson Torres, co-founder and Executive Manager at the Pact for the Promotion of Racial Equity, commented that, although companies are advanced in the ESG agenda, there are still many questions, since 56% of the Brazilian population is black, but less than 10% in leadership positions.
“How can these advances be measured and communicated to society? When we bring up the racial issue, we still have resistance on the governance aspect. We still need to demand more from society and for it to be an agent of mobilization”, he declared.
The Pact for the Promotion of Racial Equity aims to implement a Racial ESG Protocol for Brazil, bringing the racial issue to the center of the Brazilian economic debate and attracting the attention of large national and multinational companies, civil society and the Government to the subject.
For him, one of the solutions is what the Pact has provoked. “There is no way to fight ills without knowing them. What we have been doing is showing companies how this malady behaves, takes root and multiplies within organizations, using public data and bringing indicators. For those who don’t know how to start, creating an ESG protocol based on race works for them, small, medium or large”, he told the public.
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