Importance of women entrepreneurs

/in by

The role of women has evolved over the years in the society. From joining the corporate as well as the government sector and holding key positions, there is no field as such in which the women counterparts have not proved. Same is the case as to being entrepreneurs, which comes with a lot of challenges when a women decides to be one. The first and foremost being her role in the household whether she is a daughter, mother, wife or a sister. Be it any role but her responsibilities towards managing the family are a hindrance in her professional career. The answer to all those challenges lies in the art of multitasking and that even quite an effective one. As Pakistan is ranked 143 out of the 144 countries in the Global Gender Gap report for 2016 due to the lack of equal opportunities for women and inadequate opportunities for women.

Having said that there are numerous examples around us where women have proved themselves as successful entrepreneurs globally. Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop puts it like “if you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.” Sara Blakely, who is the founder of Spanx and is the youngest self-made billionaire in America, Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington post, J.K Rowling, author, Rashmi Sinha founder of Slide Share are all such examples of women who overcame the fear of failure and left footprints.

The daring women of our country have also made a mark for themselves in various fields. Maryam Adil who is the founder of Gaming Revolution for International development (GRID), Jehan Ara from Pakistan Software Houses Association, Roshaneh Zafr founder of Kashf foundation along with many others. The foremost requirement which women need to overcome is restoration of faith in themselves that they can also make a difference and be a role model for many other women. The only way in which this can be achieved is when a woman realises her own powers. As she is an epitome of confidence and is capable of doing things which no one can even imagine of, women can achieve milestones.

Women entrepreneurs can bring a lot of diversity in the business environment as they have the knack of doing things differently. They are also quite perfectionists and dynamic. Women tend to plan and proceed so they are able to save the time and money of the business as everything works according to a schedule. Also in Pakistan it is expected that one billion women will be joining the global workforce in the coming decade.

The current economic situations requires massive input in order to achieve stability. Many countries which are facing the problems of lower GDP generation can benefit from women lending hands towards the economic stability. Moreover the global economic conditions requires the promotion of entrepreneurial thinking and entrepreneurship. This can be easily achieved by providing opportunities to women entrepreneurs. According to President Women Entrepreneurs Association of Pakistan (PWEAP) Anum Kamran almost 95% of the women in Pakistan are not working to their true potential.

Although women entrepreneurs are a great contribution to our society and an emerging trend globally but it still has grey areas which needs to be addressed. Firstly adequate training and access to the required resources need to be arranged to enable the business to expand. Secondly the support required from their immediate families to step in to the field of entrepreneurship is another major problem faced by the women entrepreneurs. Still many societies discourage women from entering this field as it is male-dominated. Moreover, since women have a lot of responsibilities towards their families they are not able to take a break from that. Multi-tasking is not as easy it sounds therefore it becomes quite tough for a women to look after her home and business. Even if they are able to manage both simultaneously, time constraints lead to one aspect being compromised over the other. So it is a lot of balancing act which a woman has to do in order to become successful entrepreneur.

It is important that the government also works towards this aspect in order to facilitate the potential women entrepreneurs. Incentives should be introduced in order to encourage these women to be confident enough to start their own businesses easily and also manage them effectively. Also introduce trainings and other necessary resources so that women can easily manage their responsibilities.

Having women entrepreneurs can impact the society in a really positive way. Empowering women to step outside and giving them an insight of the real world can benefit the future generations as well. As the saying goes “educate a man and you educate one person, educate a women and you educate the entire generation.

By: Madiha Kauser

ACCA is currently working as a freelancer. She is a blogger, article writer, and editor. Her interests include reading and research.

Women on Board

/in by

“When women participate in the economy everyone benefits”
(Hillary Clinton)

Those who favor diversity perceive that women recruitment on board is a “strategic necessity”. Women can make specific contribution to an organization. A multilevel analysis of a large US dataset shows that there is indeed a large and robust difference between male and female personalities.

Females score higher on sensitivity, warmth, apprehension, and more risk adverse
Vs.
Men score higher on emotional stability, dominance, rule consciousness, and vigilance.

Equality between women and men is always in discussion especially when it comes to employment and occupation. Women have been struggling for the opportunity to break into company boardrooms in the developed and developing countries across since last quarter of twentieth century. However, female board members remain in the minority, their numbers are steadily growing. That is one of the reasons that some countries make it as part of corporate law to adopt a considerable number of directives on matters such as equal treatment in employment and occupation.

In 2003, Norway was the first country introduce 40 percent women quota on listed companies board followed by France (33 percent) and Germany (30 percent) among others.  This is emerging trend and rest of the countries including Asian countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia etc. has followed this rule for listed companies to have women on board in their code of corporate governance regulation where women hold just one in eight seats on the boards of Asia’s largest public companies.

The Graph represents Global Women presentation on board.

06-1

Source: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/01/05/gender-parity-on-boards-around-the-world/

Since 2004, Egon Zehnder has tracked gender diversity through the Global Board Diversity Analysis (GBDA) to examine trends across the boardrooms of the world’s largest companies to gain a global understanding of gender diversity. The 2016 GBDA is the firm’s most comprehensive to date, evaluating board data from 1,491 public companies with market caps exceeding EUR 6bn across 44 countries. The graph shows the slow but positive gender diversity progress.

06-2

Gender Diversity Index (GDI) reports indicates that women now hold more than 20% of the board seats of Fortune 1000 companies. They also indicated that smaller companies have poorer diversity records than industry leaders. The growth of women on board in Fortune 1000 companies is increased over the years.

06-3

Source: https://www.2020wob.com/companies/2020-gender-diversity-index

In Asia, women hold just one in eight seats on the boards of public companies. Asia lags behind Europe, where women hold 30 per cent of board seats at the top 500 companies, and North America, where fifth of board members at the 500 largest public companies are women.

There are many reasons for the low representation of women in top positions in boardrooms across Asia such as in-built corporate norms, practices of extremely long working hours and childcare burdens that still fall on women. As per “Corporate Women Directors International”, Women hold 27.2% of board seats in Australia and take lead on female directors in comparison to other countries in Asia.

06-4

In the past few years, many Asian countries such as Malaysia, India, Pakistan etc. introduced quota of woman on the board of all publicly listed companies. In 2011, Malaysia introduced a quota of 30% women directors which increased the proportion of female directors from 7.6% in 2011 to 16.6% in 2017. In 2013, India introduced a quota of at least one woman on the board of all public listed companies resulted the proportion of female from 5.5% in 2010 to 12.7% in 2017.

Women on Board in Pakistan

In 2017, Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) issued the revised Code of Corporate Governance under the new Companies Act 2017 that requires Board of Directors shall have at least one female director on the Board of all public listed companies and also provide training to one female executive every year under the Directors Training Program.

The goal is set to double the percentage of women directors from 6.4% to 12.8% in three years.  Currently, according to the KSE 100 index of Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), 69 out of 100 companies have no woman directors which include 16 out of the 20 largest listed companies. The proportion of women directors on the boards of listed companies is only 6.4% whereas women representation in Pakistan’s parliament is 17.2% and 15.8% in the labor force. It is also much lower than the proportion of women directors in the companies in S&P 500 and FTSE 100, which now ranges from 20% to 25%.

Another initiative taken to increase women representation is through the launch of The Women on Board Pakistan (WOB) by South Asian Federation of Exchanges (SAFE) in February 2017. Their mission is “to address the acute imbalance of women professionals on the corporate boards and higher management hierarchy in Pakistan”

52% of Pakistan populations consist of female but their presentation on board is very negligible. In 2017, WOB conducted a research of 505 companies listed on PSX stated that the total women directorship is 9.07% but only 0.83% is unrelated or professional women directors. The remaining proportion of 8.25% is family/ related women directors. In terms of chairperson positions, women are holding 7.13% of total chairpersons’ positions but only 0.40% (two chairperson positions) is unrelated or professional women chairpersons. Overall, women hold 11 CEO, 9 CFO, 27 company secretary positions in the 505 companies listed on PSX.

Since the start of Director Certification Program in 2007 by Pakistan Institute of Corporate Governance (PICG) only 162 women have been certified from the program. 73 of these qualified women are serving as directors on boards of listed companies.

The WOB research shows that companies in Pakistan are hiring related women to fill in the positions and shows gender diversity on their board and top management. It is the time to change the mindset and bring the professional women on board to comply with regulations of having one female director on board to create a culture of corporate change and diversity rather than inviting women to fill the quota.  Catalyst conducted a research that shows that corporate boards with woman/women have a 36 percent better return of equity in comparison with those that have all-male.

Women contribution is globally recognizing in all sectors. It is time to change the mindset of gender differentiation and utilization of women potential in development and growth, politics, research and developments, etc. of country. It is very important that government and policy makers should focus on education and training for women to make them capable of playing their role in country development in all sectors. Organizations also need to incorporate gender diversity in their strategic planning and adopt in a corporate governance policies.

                “If you want something said ask a man; if you want something done ask a woman”                                                                                                        Margaret Thatcher

references:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067983/this-is-the-state-of-gender-diversity-on-boards-around-the-world

https://30percentclub.org/assets/uploads/UK/Third_Party_Reports/2016_GBDA_DIGITAL_FINAL.pdf

https://www.ft.com/content/1b0d7abe-33ff-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/05/19/the-countries-with-the-most-women-in-the-boardroom-infographic/#63a745da7141

http://picg.org.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Women_in_Corporate_World.pdf

https://www.secp.gov.pk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Press-Release-July-8-Women-directors-in-Pakistan.pdf

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/01/05/gender-parity-on-boards-around-the-world/

http://wob.com.pk/downloads/WOB-Annual-Report.pdf

Current reality of Gender Equality in the world

/in by

Even in this contemporary world where mankind has splendid credits to its name for all sorts of technological development yet the very basic aspect of human society in form of ‘gender equality’ is compromised. The understanding and recognition of the fact that women deserve the same quality of life as of men at large have rarely been educated and accepted. Without equal status in society, improvement in quality of life can never be achieved, particularly where half of the world’s population comprises of women and girls. Through continuous human efforts in different part of the world in both, developed and under developed countries several rights which were previously regarded solely for men, have been extended to women. Nevertheless, the complete eradication of gender disparity is still in its early stages in many parts of the world.

According to an analytical report1 issued by  the World Bank, out of  141 countries,  24.1% countries have no legislation on domestic violence, where as 13.5% countries have no legislation that specifically address sexual harassment. In the chart below; a data has been drawn to further quantify the lack of protection against sexual harassment in employment, education and public places over a period of time;

07-2

Even though the figures depict slight improvement, there are millions of women lacking legal protection against sexual harassment for 2017, in employment, education, and public places are at 362 million,
1.5 billion, and 2.2 billion, respectively. The report further defines the economic violence that is faced by women whereby they are forcefully restrained from working and having an independent source of income. A recent report2 issued by UN Women provides that there are 18 countries where husbands can legally prevent their wives from work. In other words in those countries the economic violence is being protected by the country’s law and establishment.

The international humanitarian organizations in consultation with local bodies have been collecting and analyzing immense data since decades and setting achievable goals from time to time. However due to the gravity and complexity of the issues pertaining to gender disparity the complete eradication has not been achieved as yet.

Gender equality can be enhanced by increasing women’s decision-making and participation in economic, political and social processes. Encouraging them to build opinion, access education and have a voice in matters that affect them in any way. They should be given better access to resources in form of improved level of education and skill. As per a data fact sheet of UN Women report2, worldwide there are more male internet user than females. Both genders are worthy of equal opportunities in terms of health and safety. Unfortunately, in the year 2015, 303,000 women died due to pregnancy related issues, similarly in almost two thirds of countries, women are more likely than men to report food insecurity.

The International Labor Office reports3, the gender wage gap is as wide as 23%, which further explains why women and girls are over represented among the poor.  There are disparities even in hourly wage rates and have been documented in the report to be 10%, which means women earn 90% of what men earn. Along with the need to fulfill the social and personal responsibilities, there are many other factors attributed to explain the wage gap prevailing in the world, such as education, age, undervaluation of women work, practice of discrimination, and career breaks. The progress in minimization of this gap is slow and it can take up to 70 years to remove the gap completely. The issues such as gender pay gap cannot be correlated to a country’s social or economic development, rather it pertains to many economically developed countries as well.

Despite the fact that in many countries these days, women have the required education and skill set for the jobs, yet they face multiple barriers and lack equal involvement in labor market. Similarly, the retirement benefits are not at par and around 200 million old women are living without any regular pension income which turns out to be 85 million more than the men living without regular pension income in the world.

The current reality of gender equality might still be bleak, however as compared to the past progress has been made in a number of areas.    Ending gender disparity is the utmost human right and both men and women deserve equal opportunities. There exist inequalities in participation in labor market, wage gaps, availability of economic resources, decision making authority and representation, likewise the underlying issues of sexual and economic violence need to be resolved. The issues are so deep rooted that it requires nothing less than a radical change in underlying thought process. Institutions at large should commit to basic awareness of human rights in terms of gender equality and provide for social justice and inclusivity, as well as the governments should take every possible measure in order to eradicate the unjust social phenomena, only then the equitable distribution of economic gains can be ensured and a just society can prevail.

By: Sahrish Wajahat

  1. Ending violence against women and girls: Global and regional trends in women’s legal protection against domestic violence and sexual harassment: Paula Tavares and Quentin Wodon
  2. “Turning promises into action: gender equality in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development”
  3. Women at work Trends- 2016, International Labor Office – ILO Geneva

Sahrish Wajahat ACA

A freelance consultant, with more than 8 years of post-qualification experience. Served in various capacities at several external/internal audits, accounting reviews and consultancies of development, educational and government sector.