Women in Entrepreneurship

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Women represent about 50% of the global population yet own only ⅓ of the world’s businesses and still get paid 37% less than men. Georgette Barnes, a Ghanian entrepreneur, and Stanford professors Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld and Margaret Neale share experiences, advice, and strategies for navigating the workforce as a woman — from power dynamics and negotiations to gender expectations and harassment.

The challenges women face working in a man’s world keep stacking up, even as female entrepreneurs like Georgette Barnes learn how to overcome them. As a supplier of mining support services in West Africa, Barnes faced resistance from her very first interview, “I said nobody wants to give me opportunities. Nobody wants to give me the experience that you are asking for.”

Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld is not surprised. She has been researching women and power at Stanford Graduate School of Business and says Barnes’ experience reflects a broader trend of who gets opportunities and why. Gruenfeld says “We tend to think a leader looks like a man. And so it's very easy to see leadership potential in a man because a man looks like what we expect to see. But a woman doesn't actually look to us like what we think a leader is supposed to look like. So, that's a way in which women are sometimes held back and not chosen first for leadership roles.”

Gender expectations also impact the way women negotiate, according to Professor Margaret Neale. Her research shows that women negotiating face more challenges than their male counterparts because there is a societal expectation about how women should be in society. And to make matters worse, Neale says “women have systematically lower expectations for what they can achieve in negotiations than their male counterparts.”

Barnes experienced this self-doubt when she explored the idea of starting her own business. “I knew I wanted to set up my own company,” Barnes reflected, “but I didn't think I could do it. And I didn't think that a young African Ghanaian woman should have that dream.”

Barnes prevailed but Dr. Gruenfeld suggests women need to develop their personal power to “deal with the narrative in your head…to make sure that you take charge of how you interpret the situation that you’re in.”

Listen to Barnes’ firsthand experience on the stereotypes and obstacles she contends with every day and hear Gruenfeld’s and Neale’s advice on how women — and men — can shift the paradigm for themselves and future generations.

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