Even during the tough times of the Covid-19 pandemic, several start-ups, and businesses evolved such that their business model was sustained while others failed. However, such companies or start-ups require proper adversary measures and strong minds working together. In this article, we will discuss in detail how the rise in women startups empowerment will follow and help this society and the individuals to rise against odds.
Empowering women is yet another form of bringing in gender equality as a real-life concept, hence changing the stereotypical mentality of only men being capable of handling businesses. Now, even though the percentage is less, we can find several business women leading the top global sectors and it is high time that we accept, encourage, and utilize their skills effectively.
How with Women Startups Empowerment will follow?
Current initiatives for women's economic empowerment are insufficient to address all of the challenges that female entrepreneurs face. The recent evidence from cognitive science and exploratory economics on agency, attitude, and management indicates that for effective interventions to be truly transformational, they must go beyond basic access to economic assets, resources and address key psychological, sociocultural, and expertise limitations for women entrepreneurs. Recent research from randomized control trials on various investment-based, training-based, and sex-based treatments presents viable initiatives to help women entrepreneurs.
Women StartupsMany female entrepreneurs face difficulty as they have mindset barriers that men, in general, do not. Women, for example, are more averse to uncertainty and risk-taking than men. After such a financial capital and basic market training intervention, an experiment found that women still engage in lesser competitive situations than males. Revenue and overall corporate performance get hampered by this approach. Such a lab experiment on mindset constraints discovered that with the same intervention, men who did not restrict themselves in this sense saw a significant rise in sales. Such in-depth sessions also trained skills and knowledge around entrepreneurship characteristics including long-term perspective, awareness in business, self-confidence, and people management.
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Innovative Women Start-Ups in India
We have curated 3 inspiring start up stories led by modern women that are worth mentioning right now. Here we go!
1. Sujata Chatterjee’s Twirl Store
Twirl resulted as Sujata Chatterjee wanted to do something against the amount of garbage produced by fast fashion trends and the impact they had on climate change. As a result, she quit her corporate position as a marketer at HP India and launched Twirl, a social enterprise in the year 2017.
The almost four years old company encourages users to bring in clothing they no longer need in exchange for rewards which allows users to redeem them on the platform's eCommerce website. It sorts items into categories depending on repurposed or non-repurposed clothes such as bags, coats, or other cool accessories. Un-repurposed clothing is given in slum regions in West Bengal's Santiniketan and Sunderbans areas. This Kolkata-based entrepreneur employs an entirely female workforce, with eight main workers and another 40 working on the outskirts.
Sujata Chatterjee is an engineer by education. Her project attempts to minimize fabric waste while also empowering women and giving back to society. We are in a commercial peak era, where the closet is usually crammed with things you won't wear but yet retain. At the same time, in villages and slums, lakhs of individuals struggle to find simple clothes and a respectable means of income. Additionally, Sujata's ethical venture is the result of inspiration by the impact of rapid fashion's influence on natural resources and the environment.
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Twirl Store collaborates with institutions and organizations for large demands, assuring increased demand for recycled items and much more employment for women producers. "The Twirl program serves both people and the environment, and it aims to revolutionize the way India views shopping," she remarked. Such women startups empowerment is the solution to help the society as well as support a business at the same time.
2. Abhilasha Purwar’s Blue Sky Analytics
Abhilasha Purwar, a social entrepreneur, created Blue Sky Analytics in July 2018 to address the effects of climate change. The AI-powered firm offers real-time environmental parameters as well as practical environmental insights regarding air and water quality. Abhilasha, who co-founded Blue Sky with her sibling Kshitij, hopes to turn their application BreeZo into the Bloomberg of environmental data. She graduated from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies with a master's degree in environmental management.
Her inspiration is the result of witnessing the consequences of climate change firsthand when a river in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, turned orange. She had successfully completed her master's degree in applied chemistry from IIT Varanasi and was working at Jameel Poverty Action Lab on IoT-enabled air quality monitoring devices (J-PAL). Presently, the 29-year-old has worked with around 11 institutions and coaches aspiring social entrepreneurs.
3. Anannya Parekh's Inner Goddess
Inner Goddess is Anannya Parekh's company that inspires women by teaching them the value of financial literacy. Its goal is to address financial anxieties, mental health difficulties, and personal development, and it has already hosted over 70 sessions. The startup focuses on young ladies between the ages of 16 and 25 who come from low-income families.
The courses used to cost between Rs 300 and Rs 20,000 earlier, but Inner Goodness is now a non-profit organization. Since its launch in September 2016, her social endeavor has influenced over 10,000 women in Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, illustrating the popular saying, 'Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.'
Multiple stakeholders throughout the ecosystem will benefit from concentrated efforts to create a gender-inclusive ecosystem and drive India's performance on key gender parity indices. However, a harder push is required to urge corporate and public sector participants to do something to support female entrepreneurs. Hence there is a need to create greater opportunities for women entrepreneurs who wish to start up and change their understanding of entrepreneurship's merits. In this article, we have pondered upon the various reasons and real-life examples of how with the growth of women startups empowerment of the gender will prevail. Hope this article ignites the fire of doing something against the odds and succeeding as an entrepreneur.
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