Dell India launches Mumbai chapter of DWEN to boost female entrepreneurship
Dell organized its Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN)meetup for the first time in Mumbai last week, with 14 women entrepreneurs participating and sharing stories of their journeys. The gathering discussed ways and means to foster high potential female entrepreneurship and the factors needed to make the environment conducive.
Ritu Gupta, director marketing at Dell India played host at the event. “Entrepreneurship has always been core to us at Dell. Through DWEN, we provide a ready platform for women entrepreneurs to collaborate, share ideas and best practices among themselves. We see an immense scope for growth of the Indian women entrepreneurship ecosystem,” she said.
Ritu also shared insights about gender related issues specific to India, which are findings of the Gender-GEDI survey that Dell uses as adiagnostic tool to measure high potential female entrepreneurship by analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems, business environments and individual aspirations across 30 developed and developing economies spanning multiple regions, providing a systematic approach that allows cross-country comparison, benchmarking, and identifies data gaps. The goal of the research is to identify country-wide strengths and weaknesses and develop strategies to create more favorable conditions in their countries to enable businesses founded by women to thrive.
According to the report, India has improved its ranking from the 2013 Gender-GEDI report that was released at DWEN last year that studied 17 countries worldwide. Started in 2010 in China, DWEN is a annual global event which has been held in Brazil, India, US and Turkey. The India chapter of DWEN has also conducted many regional events in markets like Delhi and Bangalore, and now Mumbai.
Key findings of the Gender-GEDI survey are :
- US (with a score of 83), Australia (80), Sweden (73), France and Germany (tied at 67), Chile (55), UK (54) and Polland (51) are the top ranking countries in the Gender-GEDI survey that support women entrepreneurship.
- India ranked No. 26 out of 30 in the survey
- India has a relatively well-developed equity capital market. There is moderate female entrepreneurship environment in terms of women identifying opportunities to start businesses (60%), feeling they have the skills (52%) and do not fear failure in starting a business (57%).
- There is also moderate female startup activity ratio 5.2/10 in India.
- There are only 6% of growth oriented female startups in India. Only 14% of exporting female startups, 14% women are in leadership positions in India. Just 18% women have access to a bank account and just 27% females in our country have secondary education.
- The results of the survey seem to show a direct link between women entrepreneurship and the country’s development and GDP in that particular. However other factors impacting female entrepreneurship across the world include female labour crowding (73%), limited legal rights for married women (73%), women having limited access to property (27%), restriction of women to access public places (23%) and unbanked women population (23%).
