Women entrepreneurs flourish: Meet 4 young start-up divas determined to succeed

As a fresher from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, Minnat Lalpuria Rao rejected 25 to 28 job offers when she graduated. Instead, the 28-year old decided to follow in her father's footsteps and become an entrepreneur.
While he spent his career in real estate, going from construction to re-development, she went in a completely different direction, setting up 7Vachan, a wedding-solutions provider in Mumbai some 15 months ago.

With some 10 million weddings held in India annually, this was an opportunity waiting to be tapped — Rao organized 150 weddings in 2013, based almost solely on word-ofmouth and in 2014 she thinks she can piece together 1,000.
At a time when there is a sharp focus on diversity and women are being encouraged to break through unseen glass ceilings, turning entrepreneur is proving to be a good way to get more women into the workforce.


With more women in management programmes (30-50%, according to various estimates) and societal pressures easing, more women are getting comfortable starting up.
For example, ISB was the Indian partner for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurs Program, a five-year programme to aid the development of women entrepreneurs.

Across seven cities, spread over 16 weeks, women went through this programme to sharpen their entrepreneurial skills. It saw over 1,300 attendees in total, says Kavil Ramachandran, who anchors ISB's entrepreneurship initiatives. "Apart from stray management programmes, the potential of women entrepreneurs hasn't been tapped," he adds. "Attendance at our programmes shows that there has been a sharp interest in entrepreneurship among women."
  Doing Their Own Thing
Start-ups may provide a new way for more women to enter and stay in the workforce. At a time when established companies are turning cartwheels to meet their diversity targets (women being a key metric in this), the lure of the unknown and the thrill of entrepreneurship may be a bigger draw than the stability of a routine job.
According to various estimates, women account for 25-35% of employees at start-ups and the number is increasing. According to venture capitalists and other risk capital investors, a growing number of women, emboldened by start-up success stories both in India and the globe, are taking the plunge.
The growing interest in entrepreneurship is visible in many places. For example, at start-up events and forums hosted by the likes of Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels, the number of women in attendance has increased sharply in the past couple of years. Individual angel investors say that more women are also walking up to them with clever business ideas.
"There has been a noticeable increase in the quality and quantity of proposals we receive from women entrepreneurs...but it is nowhere close to where it should be ideally," says Sasha Mirchandani, founder of Kae Capital, an early-stage investor.
While more women have been able to get (and stay in) a job, turning entrepreneur comes with its own set of challenges.

For one, women have traditionally had lesser access to capital to fund their businesses, hampering their ability to get their start-ups off the ground. Some of the statistics make grim reading.
According to the Gender-GEDI Female Entrepreneurship Index, a study by hardware giant Dell, India ranks poorly on all fronts. Overall, it came in 16 of 17 countries in this survey last year, with some statistics — 26% of women in India have bank accounts compared with 100% in developed markets — telling their own tale.
  Multiple factors restrain women from starting their own enterprises. Most prominent, Mirchandani of Kae points out, are social norms, which dictate that women put home, family and kids before their own aspirations — entrepreneurial or otherwise.
"There are signs that this is changing — husbands willing to play second fiddle, when the wife has a smart start-up in the works or a support system for children when both parents are at work," he adds.
Creating a Network
In some parts of the country entrepreneurial women are making waves. For example, in the arid regions of Latur and Osmanabad in Maharashtra, women are leading the charge at organizations such as Swayam Shikshan Prayog, which is building networks of rural businesses. Here, women are handpicked to sell products such as gas stoves and the best ones given charge of a region to manage.
"Women are seen to have stronger networks in the community and have more empathy with other women who control the household budget," says Aparajita Agarwal, director, Sankalp Forum, a facilitator of social enterprises.

According to Agarwal, women may prefer entrepreneurship because it lets them be more flexible with their hours, even as they earn a steady income.

From The Economic Times