Where are the Women at College Business Plan Competitions?
March 31, 2007
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Last week I attended the BYU Business Plan competition event. It was great to hear several teams compete and share their dreams/ideas/businesses…but I was disappointed that none of the top teams had any women members! I was in the top 10 here two years ago and was the only woman the center’s seen in the semi-finals for a few years. I competed at Wak
e Forest in NC (won 2nd out of 70 MBA schools) and Rice in Texas (won top 12 out of 160 Global MBA schools) and there were more women at those events, but still it’s clearly a male-dominated competition/field globally. One of my dreams for Start Up Princess is to have our OWN competition and/or to sponsor a women-only competitions. There are many, many talented women in business…where are they in the college business plan competitions?
My Ideas of How to Get More Women to Compete in Business Plan Competitions:
- Have competition organizers talk to women-based clubs, departments such as Music, Dance, Humanities, Graphic Design that have higher concentrations of women and get them excited about participating in the events as a team member or with their own idea
- Hold FREE workshops and seminars all year long on how to take an idea and transform it into a business plan
- Encourage students to begin boot-strapping their ideas so once the competition starts they can demonstrate that they are serious about it
- Create campus workshops where students can brainstorm with students who have previously been successful in business plan competitions and also professors/mentors/entrepreneurs. They can share their business ideas and learn from each other in a friendly/mentoring setting separate from the competition
- Offer Women Entrepreneur Lecture Series (BYU has one); then follow the lecture with a 30 min. optional workshop/brainstorm session where students can get feedback from the presenter about their own ideas
- When students are entering the competitions they need to be more informed what kinds of businesses are attractive to the judges/VCs/Angel investors (for example: starting an online children’s clothing store or developing a new baby product will not be attractive to judges, they want to see scalable, exciting businesses with high return potential)
- Offer a Home-based Business Plan Competition that will attract the attention of more women who have a family/plan to start a family and desire to find another stream of income by working from home as an entrepreneur
What are YOUR ideas? I want to know! I am talking with organizers of BYU business plan competitions and I hope to make a difference for women students all over the country that have great ideas for businesses and deserve to get mentoring and win some prize money too!
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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