Women in Business – Making the World a Better Place

Women in Business, Business Networking for Women

Women entrepreneurs and businesswomen are making a difference. There have been some positive changes in opportunities for women in the world of entrepreneurship.

Let’s look at the advantages, opportunities and challenges for women in business.

Advantages

Diverse work culture

Inevitably, the experiences and backgrounds of men and women will differ. It will influence how they approach business. Working with individuals with opposing viewpoints can foster creativity and promote innovative ideas that propel organizations forward.

Women excel at soft skills.

CEOs consistently cite soft skills as the most desirable professional characteristics. Although qualities such as effective communication, empathy, and self-awareness are difficult to quantify, they have a high value on the bottom line. Recent research has found a link between character strength and business performance.

Soft skills and emotional intelligence may provide a significant competitive advantage for women.

Challenges

While several industries are showing signs of a growing female workforce, industries such as finance, engineering, and technology remain heavily male-dominated. Women make up only 24% of the workforce in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) industries in the United States and less than 15% in the United Kingdom.

Organizations are working to encourage women to study computer science and engineering to close the gender gap in STEM fields. 

Business Networking for Women can help in overcoming various challenges.

Opportunity

For women, starting their own business is the quickest path to the C-suite. Over the last 20 years, women in business in the United States have increased by 74% or 1.5 times the national average. Today’s start-up culture empowers women to be their bosses and define how they want to work and make the work-life balance. Entrepreneurship provides a path for women to close the pay gap and rise to a leadership positions on their terms.

Running their own business also allows women to collaborate with and hire other ambitious, like-minded women, fostering a new generation of female leaders.