ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the barriers and challenges that they believe female entrepreneurs face versus their male counterparts based on their real-life experience, including: it’s a male-dominated world, lack of funding, and less brazen salesmanship and less time for networking. Women at almost every stage are less likely to become entrepreneurs, with much lower levels of females starting and scaling up a business. Maria Kempinska, Di Burton and Victoria Mellor all commented on the differences in how men and women do business and the dominance of male values in the work culture. Women often lack the commercial training needed to pitch successfully, or the time in the evenings to network, or even the network itself when they’ve taken time out of the commercial world to bring up a family. Victoria Mellor and Lindsay Levin go on to talk about how difficult it is for women to celebrate what they’ve achieved, due to being tough on themselves or perfectionist in nature.
