It’s time to celebrate and enthral the world for showing an avowed intent to let women work according to their desires. Nowadays, women are exhibiting tectonic courage by stepping into the domain of entrepreneurship. According to female entrepreneurship index, U.S ranks no. 1 in support of women’s entrepreneurship with 82.9% female owned companies, but countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have only 25.3%, 17.9 %, and 15.2% respectively of female-owned companies.
Though women have embarked on their journey of entrepreneurship but the challenges faced by them are certainly more than the ones faced by men entrepreneurs. It is a hard nut to crack for women to break the stereotype and work according to their desired goals. Women entrepreneurs face myriad challenges at every stage of their journey. Maybe this is the reason why according to the sixth economic census, out of 58.5 million establishes businesses, only 8.05 million of them have women as entrepreneurs.
Let’s shed light on the challenges women entrepreneurs face in their life:
1. Problem in Balancing Personal and Professional Life
A woman’s life always has a yoke around her neck to fulfil the roles ascribed to her gender. So, most of the time, she is torn between her responsibility towards her work and her feminine roles. And then her work has to be very much in consent with her family and the society.
So how would a woman as an entrepreneur face these challenges, which apparently seems trivial but in actuality can be the deciding factor of her journey as an entrepreneur? She certainly has to be enough calculative and creative to innovate a product which gets acceptance in the society, but at the same time should encompass unprecedented novelty. She has to understand that she cannot let the society decide her priorities, but she has to be enough audacious to prioritise things in her life herself. Therefore, she would have to develop an understanding with her family to make them realise the prominence of her decisions and priorities.
2. Constraints after Marriage
A girl’s life before marriage embodies fewer challenges in comparison to her journey from a girl to a woman. This journey inculcates myriad duties and responsibilities in her, sometimes as a wife, a daughter in law or a mother. A girl’s parents can still accept and understand her desires and priorities, but a woman’s life after marriage often makes her torn between her professional and personal life. And that’s where she got to make sacrifices.
So, in this blinkered world, a woman entrepreneur has to make sure that she gets married to the person who understands and respects her dreams because ultimately more than half of a woman’s life is at her husband’s house. So she better be with the one, who takes a stand for her to let her fulfil her thwarted dreams.
Related- 7 Things Made Shahnaz Husain Successful even after Marriage at 16
3. Beauty
Girls often deem beauty to be an indispensable part of their life and we often see them using various face packs, creams and make-up products in order to enhance their beauty.
But when a woman is in the field of entrepreneurship, she has to be least bothered about how she looks, especially in the initial years of business. If she has to work, she will have to at all costs. No matter how darker her complexion is becoming or how much dark circles she gets, work should be her priority.
4. The Society is Judgmental
From habiliments, nail paints, lipsticks to gestures, a woman entrepreneur is judged from head to toe. So in such an abhorrent beliefs, how many of us would actually endorse and extol this idea of working for a woman entrepreneur?
Firstly, hardly people would be interested in working under a woman because of a pre-conceived notion of women as a weaker gender. Secondly, employees would not obey her with the same intensity as they would to a male boss. Thirdly, if she passes a smile randomly, she might be thought of inviting men. Her smile can make people consider that she is in consent with something even if she is not. Moreover, a woman as a CEO of the company raising her voice because of some unprofessional activity would not be easily taken for male employees.
Therefore, in order to be successful as a woman entrepreneur in the world of men, she has to be alert, smart with her words and apparels, and know when to smile.
5. Inadequate Finances
Most of the women entrepreneurs find it hard to get financial investments. Considered that women are accustomed to living a protected life and so their ability of risk-bearing is less in comparison with male entrepreneurs, neither their family nor the investors find it felicitous to invest in businesses owned by women. 79% of women-owned businesses are self-financed and only 4.4% of women entrepreneurs manage to borrow money from financial institutions.
Therefore, in order to attain the goals as an entrepreneur, a woman has to have her own savings so that she doesn’t have to ask for financial help from others.
6. They are Less Mobile
A journey of an entrepreneur involves mobility, at times in terms of expanding the business or in order to have meetings with clients. Certainly, business has no time. If work calls, one has to be present, whether it’s late night or early morning. But constraints regarding time and going places are always incurred on women by family. Not only this even the male co-founders and male employees get judgmental with women going places audaciously.
So for women working for their dreams in business, it is imperative for them to have a strong will-power to face these constraints audaciously and not let any sort of hindrance affect the growth of their company.
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