Gender-Based Finance
Budget 2008 introduces a package of measures to support small businesses access the finance and resources they need to start up and grow. What caught my eye was the announcement of a new £12.5M capital fund to invest in businesses started by women.
I have trawled the HMRC website to try to find out more about how is that going to work but to no avail. Most businesses are built around a team, not one individual. Can men be part of the management team and have any equity share? What if other outside investors gets involved that have more testosterone (chemical structure shown) than they should?
Plenty of companies relocate to access geographically-constrained finance. Are we now going to see the first sex change to gain funding? Surely there are better ways to encourage female entrepreneurs than this. Creating an ecosystem that nurtures and support people seeking to build a business would be a better use of this money than distorting the market in this way. Investors should be backing bright ideas and good people, not worrying about genetic makeup.
2 comments:
Hello All,
Having spent most of my life resenting the chances given to men as a 'natural rite' and discriminated against time and again - give me the Money! (my maiden name was Money). Jokes apart discrimination is never a fair idea, but don't forget many women have a lot more home commitments than men and therefore do not have a social network to assist them or even savings to fall back on. I am starting a business for a number of reasons. We are on a fixed pension and my husband is registered blind. Moving house has put us into debt which I want to clear. I am 62,disabled with arthritis and want to keep my brain alive by starting an internet Social Enterprise business with a proportion of profits going to HERIB who have supported my husband. I look at gender discrimination as a welcome ray of hope that will help redress the "Little woman should stay at home looking after hubby" attitude which still isn't dead.
Anne Cox www.PowerTuneEnergySaver.com
I have a lot of experience of raising equity based funding, and do sometimes wonder whether investors discriminate based on gender. Given most investment managers are male, I suspect, if this does occur, it is more about the comfort feeling/unwriiten gut feel they get about the "likemindness" of the management team, or the evidence of experience which is more likely to come when meeting a male led team than directly related to gender.
Funding that is targeted towards businesses where women are key players in the management team, may be useful to overcome this, and should help to create more women with the relevant experience for the more conventional funds? Perhaps it will also mean there are more female investment managers?
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