Transcript
Women cover more than 50% of the world’s population, but that is not at all reflected in the leadership positions or in entrepreneurs. So, I really think it’s just fair if we have more female leaders, but there are more tangible reasons and that is that today actually most products are designed and sold by men and even products that are designed for women. So that can be just an annoyance if a product doesn’t fulfil female needs, but it can be as well deadly.
For example, there is a case of that, up until very recently, there were only male crash test dummies. So a lot of deadly accidents could have been prevented if men would have thought about testing the cars on female crushed test dummies. I think it’s really important that female entrepreneurs think about female problems because we are best suited to solve them. There is as well, often the narrative that women are actually, even the better leaders, but I think that is a damaging narrative that we should drop.
Women are often seen as more caring, more empathic, better communicators, but that is actually limiting. Leaders need to sometimes be assertive. They need the whole toolbox of what we call a ‘male qualities’ and ‘female qualities’. We should be whatever we want to be. So drop that narrative and you would be a lot less limited.
In my opinion, women are the largest untapped business opportunity because they make up just about 50% of the global population. But actually, they control around 85% of consumer spending. That seems not logical, but actually, women are not just buying products for themselves but they buy products as well for their partners, for their kids and for the elderly parents.
And there was a study asking men for whom they are buying gifts and they said their partners. Whereas when you ask the same questions to women, they have a long list of birthday gifts, of wedding gifts, of graduation gifts and holiday gifts. So when you think about all of those spendings, it actually makes sense that it sums up to 85% and women are at the same time the largest unserved market.
We see a rise in female-centred innovation and a rise of the Femtech sector. Like for example, Thinks or The Honest Company. These are companies that have [to specialize] specializing in marketing and building products “For women, By women”. And those products are usually the market leader straight away because this untapped potential really is waiting for products to serve them.
My opinion actually the challenges of the female economy are that thanks to socialization, women are often more risk-averse and way often less encouraged to start their own business. And when they even dare to then they get less funding. But there are actually as well specific challenges to the female economy. And that is that women are so used to products that are not meeting their needs because they are designed by men that they stop trusting advertisements.
So actually to say to a woman, you have to have more than an ad you need to learn about network marketing because women trust referrals and talk to other women about whether a product is good or not. Then women are as well systemic thinkers and consumers. So women care a lot more about sustainability. So that is why a lot of women-centred innovation has sustainability at its core.
