Gender Observations of Social Enterprises in Taiwan
_______
This article is part of the 21st issue of LEAP — Voices of Youth e-letter. Subscribe now.
During the 2012 Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF), former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said: “Invest in women. Women are natural social entrepreneurs.”
According to statistics from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in 2015, female social entrepreneurs outnumbered female business entrepreneurs in most regions around the world. Some scholars believe that more women prefer working in social enterprises due to innate values that break traditional stereotypes of women, resulting in a safer and friendlier workplace. Therefore, women have been playing an indispensable role in promoting social enterprise development.
How about women’s performance in Taiwan’s social enterprises? We have invited Shen Chien-wen, Yunus Social Business Centre (YSBC) at National Central University , to share his front-line observations over the past few years.
Female College Students Show a Higher Level of Interest in Social Enterprises
Established in 2014, the Yunus Social Business Centre is Taiwan’s first social enterprise center named after the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus [1]. The purpose of the center is to become a social enterprise development hub connecting Taiwan and the international community, to formulate Taiwan’s social enterprise ecosystem.
“Through our classes at the university for undergraduate students, we found that female students are more interested in social innovation and sustainable development.” The Yunus Centre has launched a series of social enterprise and social innovation courses and activities. Shen discovered that the female to male ratio of participating students is roughly 3:1 or 3:2. “I think these courses are important opportunities for the enhancement of women’s rights.”
Furthermore, Shen stated that women students perform better in class. During the entrepreneurial team coaching process, Shen also discovered that most females performed better than males in strategic planning, communication, or execution.
Therefore, in the classroom or during activities, Shen often encourages female students with outstanding performance to be group leaders. “Traditional society always believes that men should be the first and be the leader. I want to tell students that women can become decision-makers!”
Various colleges have been promoting social enterprise education, intending to cultivate the next generation of social entrepreneurs. However, even though our classrooms have so many excellent female students, the gender ratio of actual entrepreneurs in Taiwan is quite different from the ratio in the classroom.
Male Social Entrepreneurs Still Outnumber Female Social Entrepreneurs
The 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor statistics also indicated that the ratio of male entrepreneurs was higher than female across mainstream business enterprises or social enterprises in the world.
Shen Chien-wen has made the same observation. “In the entrepreneurial teams that I coach, men outnumber women by a ratio of 2:1”. His analysis was that entrepreneurship incurs high risks and high pressure. The traditional Taiwanese society and culture still retain the stereotypical impression that “women require protection”. Therefore, many would-be women entrepreneurs are forced to give up and find a stable job due to pressures from their families.
When women are considered incapable of starting a business, it is hard to find a role model for women entrepreneurs. During the third Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit in 2020, Elisa Chiu, the founder of Anchor Taiwan [2], noted that she was the only woman in the entire transaction team during her tenure spanning more than 10 years at a multinational investment bank. As a result, she had no female role model to learn from.
“We must develop an initiative to tell Taiwanese society: Women can start businesses too!” Shen also recalled that once during an international conference, all the speakers on the stage were men, and one of the speakers refused to give a speech. “I was quite astonished.”
“Every year when we hold social enterprise courses and activities, most of the participants are women. Therefore, I believe that women entrepreneurs will increase more and more” Shen believes that gender equality must be implemented consciously. Women should be given fair opportunities on a stage to express their voices and become outstanding entrepreneurs.
Note 1: In 1983, Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to provide micro-financing and entrepreneurship counseling for the economically disadvantaged to help them overcome poverty. Among the program participants, 97% of them were women. In 2006, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in helping more than 100 million people break the poverty cycle.
Note 2: Founded in 2017, Anchor Taiwan is a platform that serves to connect Taiwanese and international entrepreneurs as well as provide innovative and entrepreneurial counseling, increasing Taiwan’s visibility among foreign entrepreneurs. In 2018, Anchor Taiwan also began to operate a social community for women investors.
Also in This Issue:
2021 Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit –The Connection between Gender and Social Innovation
Focusing on gender, youth, and local, social innovation is not for the high class but a tool to present marginalized voices.
The Third Way Between Workplace and Family -Social Enterprises that Help Mothers Return to Work
Breaking the pressure on care work and unleashing women’s potential to achieve a flexible and friendly labor market.
Author : Lin Si-hou
Freelance journalist exploring gender and public issues.
