Sometime last week, I sat down in my office at home and started researching the Danish investment industry. I don’t remember what triggered it, but I remember being surprised about how determined the few VC’s I could find was on only investing in medtech and life science companies. That had me continue my late night research and I discovered what seemed to be a quite big network of Danish Business Angels. Finding this, I also saw that they were all gathering for a Master Class yesterday. Owning a fair amount of equity in a number of companies myself, I decided to give the organiser a ring. Naturally it was fully booked with a long waiting list but for some reason, they decided to call me back a day later and offered me a spot.
The Master Class, arranged by an impressive lineup of both private and governmental organisations (including the Danish Business Authorities), was an overall lecture on how to act as a Business Angel and how to make the right decisions with an extra focus on exit strategies. It was a quite exclusive session with about 30 attendees all of whom I had the feeling was invited, all of whom was above 40 and all of whom wore a suit. That’s besides me of course — I even wore my Nike Air Max 1’s. But here’s the real shocker: we were TWO women.
I don’t consider myself a feminist. Not at all actually. More than often, I get annoyed by very strong opinions about women and business opinionated by women who have nothing to do with business at all. Don’t get me wrong though, there is nothing I love more than strong women. I think we are the coolest to walk this earth. What I don’t like and want, is to be elected for the board of a company because they need 20 percent women to display good corporate governance. I want to be chosen, because good corporate governance is to have a diverse group of people making important decisions in order to maintain happy stakeholders both internally and externally. Equality is misunderstood — in order to be an equal, you need to be judged from the exact same starting point which in my world, in most cases, means not looking at gender at all. That’s why I am so surprised by the thoughts going through my mind yesterday.
Coming from working in an American basketball organisation, believe me, I have no problem working in companies where the majority are men. Work never makes me feel insecure and I tend to always speak my mind. So I did — to many’s surprise I think. But it was interesting and so I engaged. I think it was appreciated to be honest. Me talking seemed like something new.
I think a lot women would feel slightly intimidated by the men in that room but I wasn’t. At least that’s what I thought until now when I realise that I, when I opened my computer during lunch, excused myself to the guys at my table saying ‘‘I am not trying to look busy, I actually really have something urgent to do’. They laughed and I followed up with laughing myself saying ‘it’s not minority complexes’.
Three minutes before that, my partner called me saying that two major media wanted to run a story about our company and that I had to respond a journalist. Do you know what that makes me? That makes me the company these guys are gonna read about in their afternoon news feed. So why on earth do I have the need to explain myself?
Also, I didn’t exchange more than a smile and a ‘look at us’ nodge with the other woman present. I don’t have the answer for this either, but I think in order to get where we are now, we never took any easy ways out. And we felt like the men would feel like talking to each other during lunch, being the only two women, would have been the easy way out. That’s bullshit though.
My point is that we, as women and as men, have the power to control any situation. And especially us women have to realise that yes, we are a minority in business and management. But no men can change that. We can. It is not the men’s fault that no more women was in that room. All it took for me to get there was a phone call. And seriously, women as a people have more spending power than China so please, consider yourself important to business. You are.
A good day is when you face a good challenge. Yesterday, I was my own challenge. Of course the men (and probably the other woman) in that room was thinking ‘I wonder why she is here’? But to be fair, I am 26 and wore suede Nike Air Max 1’s. I chose to think that they, more than anything, was impressed. And if not, screw them. I’m the boss.
