Advancing the State of Women Entrepreneurship in Canada
Entrepreneurship can play an important role in employment, driving innovation and economic growth, and creating social impact and sustainability.
Women entrepreneurs have much to offer in this context but remain an under-served and under-financed population; globally women entrepreneurs receive just two per cent of venture capital funding.
“We see the barriers women entrepreneurs are up against, and the loss of opportunity for all that results—and we’re changing that,” Canada’s Minister of International Trade Mary Ng recently said at an announcement regarding funding under the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES).
The $7-billion strategy aims to remove the systemic barriers women face when accessing financing, resources and networks they need to start-up, scale up and reach global markets.
It’s a unique strategy among the global community, one focused on improving conditions for diverse women entrepreneurs. Among the initiatives enabled by WES is Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) at the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University, a national network created with the support of federal funding in 2018 aimed at improving the ecosystem for women entrepreneurs of all types. The hub leads and curates research to inform and support the strategy by deepening our understanding of both the barriers and drivers of women entrepreneurship, documenting the existing context and testing different approaches to innovate within it.
WEKH works primarily with organizations serving women entrepreneurs, including women-focused groups but also chambers of commerce, incubators, financial institutions and others, with a focus on encouraging more inclusive practices across the ecosystem.
One of the vehicles for its advocacy and education is the annual State of Women Entrepreneurship report, which provides an annual analysis of new research on women entrepreneurship in Canada in an effort to impact policy and strategy.
The research shows that women face barriers, bias, microaggressions and outright harassment at every stage in their entrepreneurial journeys. Understanding the impact of these behaviours is crucial to determining how to best tackle the current inequities.
“We have to grapple with the current biases that are baked into the system,” says WEKH Academic Director and Diversity Institute founder Wendy Cukier. “These biases exist at every level, from societal, to organizational, to the individual, and they are so much more significant when we begin to lay other identities such as race or sexual orientation or religious beliefs.”
And it’s getting more difficult for those women: according to Statistics Canada data, the overall proportion of Indigenous and diverse women entrepreneurs with intersecting identities declines from 2017 to 2020. And with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs became even more acute, as they felt the brunt of the impact on the sector. The pandemic laid bare the unpaid and seen labour many women shoulder, which highlights the necessity to target broader social policies in the effort to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem for women, such as improved child and elder care.
As this year’s State of Women Entrepreneurship report notes, shifting the knowledge, attitude and behaviours of decision makers and funders needs to be a priority. Pointing out their own biases and how those biases are in turn embedded within the system is crucial to understanding how they work to impede women at every stage of the entrepreneurial journey, from their interactions with teachers and career counsellors to mentors, venture capitalists, policy makers and lenders.
These women-focused efforts are important, says Cukier but the ultimate goal of this advocacy and research is to create a more equitable landscape where those efforts are no longer needed because the barriers are gone, and women have equal access to opportunities like procurements and investments.
Of course, that’s not to say those efforts are important, Cukier adds. But it’s crucial to understand why they are necessary—not because women aren’t inherently capable as entrepreneurs but because the biases and stereotypes are holding them back.
“As long as we need to categorize them as ‘‘women entrepreneurs’ and as long as they’re directed to women-focused funds and initiatives, what we’re saying is women are different and in need of special treatment,” Cukier says. “I want to get to the point where when we hear the word entrepreneur, we think of a woman as quickly as we think of a man.”