Comments on: Where are the Women at College Business Plan Competitions?

By: startupspark.com - The Carnival of Entrepreneurs #18

startupspark.com - The Carnival of Entrepreneurs #18 — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:03:16 +0000

[...] Anderson asks Where are the women at college business plan competitions? Women still don’t make up the proper proportion of business folk but we know the number is [...]

By: startupprincess

startupprincess — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:30:19 +0000

Thanks, Alex. I appreciate the mention of Prowess, I will check into their organization and try to connect with them…I hope our organization can be that kind of force for young women entrepreneurs too. I will tell my friends at other US Start Up supporting organizations– Ladies Who Launch, The Wild We, and YEA Biz that we all need to encourage college aged women to participate in these events.

By: Alex Bellinger

Alex Bellinger — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:25:16 +0000

In the UK there’s a non-profit organisation called Prowess which focuses on encouraging and stimulating female entrepreneurship. I was lucky enough to interview Erika Watson who is the chief exec of Prowess.

They hold regular seminars, events, mentoring and much else besides. These kinds of bodies can play an important in encouraging women to take part in competitions like the one’s your describing.

By: What News Can I Share with the Local Media on a Weekly Basis? at StartUpPrincess.com

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:20:09 +0000

[...] Local Mom Blogger-Woman Entrepreneur writes suggestions for how to get more women involved in colleg… Do these headlines give you ideas? I just picked these topics from a week’s worth of [...]

By: startupprincess

startupprincess — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:25:37 +0000

Thanks, Amy for your insight and input here…you’re absolutely right…science/tech is big for these competitions although I’ve seen a variety of plans make the top 3, but the emphasis DOES seem to be potential for big money, scalable models that VCs get excited about…

For women who do want to have a family it’s hard to put your heart into scalable concepts/ventures unless you go into it with a partner or a team…so that is my advice–to surround yourself with a solid team so its more realistic and doable.

I think the idea of creating a home-based business plan competition is great for women with young families! I want to investigate how to set up a competition of this nature. Most of the women on this site are entrepreneurs who work from home and are creating amazing things!

By: Amy Cham

Amy Cham — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 06:57:02 +0000

I have some thoughts on this…I’m about to graduate from my MBA program, and looked seriously at the b-plan competitions this year. However, they were so strongly dominated by heavy tech and sciences that I didn’t see the point of entering my internet marketing consultancy or a web-based co-publishing idea a friend and I came up with.

I suspect the dominance of hardcore science and tech has something to do with it. Those are male-dominated fields, so the b-plan comps will be male-dominated. Additionally, these sorts of businesses don’t strike me as being especially family-friendly…it’s harder for a 28-year-old woman to commit the next ten years to working 70-hour weeks commercializing a cutting edge technology than it is for a man.

I would love to see competitions designed to break out of this track–something geared specifically toward new services businesses, or toward consumer-facing business. As long as the winners are predominantly ideas with nano-bio-molecular-silica-fusion-particle-compound names, I don’t think we’ll see much of a change in the estrogen void…we can do the science, but there are other aspects that make that kind of business a difficult commitment for us to make.