Few women in rural Bangladesh actually have mobile phones, but billboards like this one (which Jim shot a good ways out from Dhaka), probably go a long way toward normalizing the idea that women should have them.

It is easy to think that new technologies will solve our problems in economic development.  And, to be sure, the internet and, especially, mobile phones are making a huge difference in the developing world already.

But it is also important to understand their limitations.  From my own observations, but especially since reading the Intel and CBFW reports on women and technology, I am convinced that we need bear in mind the reception conditions for technology in developing nations, while taking steps to achieve wide dissemination as soon as possible.  Specifically, we need to be mindful that:

1.  Women have much less access than men and this is largely due to gender norms.  The men get the technology first, partly because they control the purse strings, but much of it because they stand in the portal of the door to the outside world.  They attribute all kinds of corruptive influences to both technologies and insist they need to protect their families from it.

2.  The reach simply is not as wide as we think.  Mobile technology is much, much more common than internet access in the developing world.  Even when people have access to the web, they often have insufficient bandwidth to, for example, skype or even watch a video. This is true even in cities and even among elites.

3.  Literacy and language are still barriers.  Complex websites that require good English literacy, as well as good computer skills, are not usable by many, many women, even among the elite.

At the Power Shift Forum, we will be honored to hear the research results from Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, Vodafone, and Intel, all of whom are leaders in this area.

The collaboration occurring is between some of the biggest companies in the world–  Walmart, Goldman Sachs, IBM, ExxonMobil, Intel–and governments, NGOs, international agencies.  The radical aspect is in the intent:  to refocus the global supply chain to include women as vendors.  This sounds so technical when you write it out, but the upshot will be an historic equalizing in the location of wealth, from a gender perspective.  It is one of the most exciting things that has ever happened in women’s rights.  And that makes Buying for Impact an important book.

It doesn’t read like Beauvoir.  And the little diagrams are more like B-School than Betty Friedan.  And they will never accept this in gender studies, even if they read it (which they won’t).  But mark my words, there will be more change coming from this radical collaboration than from a month of marches.

My hat is off.

Caitlin in a Halloween costume I made for her just before the business went down. Little did we know, the Big Bad Wolf would soon blow the house down, too.

One of the worst times in my life was a business failure.  It was back in the mid-1980s, when Caitlin was just a toddler, just before Liza was born.  My husband wanted to start an electronic yellow pages.  It was in the days before the internet–this was to be a telephone-accessed database.  People would call in and ask for a plumber or a restaurant or whatever and we would search by location or by feature or by price or whatever.

It was exciting in the early stages when we were developing the software. We raised the money from relatives and friends.  Others were persuaded of the innovative and convenient concept and some put substantial savings into it.  We needed a lot of capital to finance the equipment, so we reached out to a lot of people.

We started up in Austin, Texas and developed a smashing advertising campaign to raise the awareness of the telephone number (which was 345-6789, I kid you not).  We jingled the hell out of that number on the radio and reached 90% awareness in no time.  We got lots of traffic and so were able quickly to sell a lot of listings.

But the yellow pages business is fundamentally based on “Mom and Pop shops.”  So, when the bottom fell out of the oil market six months later and Mom and Pop started closing up shop, the writing was on the wall for us.

A horrible death watch began.  Every Friday, I would hold my breath to see if we would make payroll.  Eventually, we had to shut it down.  Like many others in Austin that year, we lost our house.  That happened right about the time Liza was born.  Within a few months, my marriage failed.  So, I was out on the street with two little children and no one to turn to but my family.  And most of that family had lost a good bit of money in my business.  It took me years to get over that experience.

People who promote entrepreneurship like to talk about how we have to get over the stigma we place on failure.  I always suspect that these glib speakers have never actually lived through a business failure themselves.  It’s an experience that pulls everyone around you down with it.  People are right to be afraid of it.  And women are more likely to worry about it than men.  I certainly worried more than my husband did.  And I think I carried the scars a lot longer, too.

Some 90% of business start-ups fail.  And that can happen even with the best of preparation.  Policy and education aimed at entrepreneurs needs to take that into account.

As we were getting ready for the Power Shift Forum, I kept telling the other organizers that we needed to have someone talk about failure.  But of course nobody ever wants to get up and talk about that in front of other people.  So, today, it’s going to be me who represents the tragedy of a business going down.  This is not something I like to talk about.  But I felt we needed to represent reality.  Yuck.

The other speakers have been more successful, so that will lighten things up.  We have divided this one into “Beginnings, Middles, and Ends” in order to try to illustrate the different stages of entrepreneurship, the way it unfolds in time, causing different strains and emotions as that happens.  The Beginnings session will feature three women at the early stage:  Rana Harvey of Monster Group, Julie Boyd of TR Fleet, and Shelly Hoppe of Southerly Communications.  In the middle will be Kresse Wesling of Elvis and Kresse, as well as Kyle Zimmer of First Book.  Ernst and Young will be on hand to offer perspective in that session, as well.  The End session will be mine.  But my demise will be balanced by Lara Morgan of Pacific Direct and Fleur Heyns of Global Trader.

More details about Power Shift are available here.

Jim took this picture when we were working on the sanitary pads project in Northern Ghana in early 2009.

The problem of measurement haunts women’s economics, especially in the arena of women-owned businesses.  Whether you are looking at how to compare salaries in the formal sector or how to evaluate motives in among sole proprietors, the challenge is considerable.

Counting and evaluating women-owned businesses is a particular puzzle for several reasons. The first is that most women’s enterprise is informal, thus unregistered and uncounted.  The second is that it is difficult to determine, even face-to-face, what is really a woman-owned business and what is not.  That’s because a woman may own the business–because of inherited money or whatever–and her husband run it.  Or, because of increasing assistance available for women-owned businesses in developing nations, a man may own the business but pretend his wife does in order to claim such benefits.  Most often, a business is owned and run by a whole family and it is hard to tell (or even to say) who is really in charge. Add to that the fact that most government registries and the like do not ask about the gender of the person in charge, and you begin to get a picture of the problem.

The Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) has recently begun to focus on these issues, along with their generally increased attention to closing the gender gap, as I have reported here in previous posts.  There is a new report called the “Entrepreneurship at a Glance” that has a special section on women (pp. 21-35).  You can download it here:  Entrepreneurship@Glance12.

The main measure of entrepreneurship has been the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which produces a special report on women.  This data is substantial and covers many countries, but, as with most large scale datasets, does not cover rural areas in developing countries well.  And, I must say it is my opinion that many of the questions in GEM are artifacts of Western prejudice.

All these datasets are as good as we’ve got for the moment and all the organizations behind them are working hard to try and make them more accountable and sensitive.  In the meantime, at the fine grain end of the spectrum, there is another urgent need, which is for metrics to measure the impact of focused interventions.  Many big corporations (ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs) and many foundations or NGOs (Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, CARE) have extensively deployed particular interventions on behalf of women entrepreneurs and need a common language of metrics with which to evaluate them.  These programs are very often located in the poorest areas–”Bottom of the Pyramid” efforts–and so run into all the problems of cultural variation and poverty effects that can become sticky.

It might seem that the obvious interest for such programs would be in business measurements:  sales, profit, number of employees, growth.  For businesses working at this end of the scale, however, it is often difficult even to get a reasonable accounting of, for instance, sales or profit–and, believe it or not, it may be difficult to decide what counts as an employee (because neighbors and family members may pitch in or orphans may work for food, and so on).

Further, most institutions investing at this end of the economic scale intend to have social and other effects as their desired outcome, rather than a specific business measure. Institutions who invest in such programs want to see empowered women and educated children, for instance, perhaps more than they care about a particular growth rate.  So there are measures needed before and after the business achievement and those must capture elusive phenomena.  Finally, we know that issues such as domestic violence can turn even the most promising business sour–and how would an institution funding a program become aware of that intrusion?  So, it’s. . . complicated.

At the Power Shift Forum, we are going to have a session on measurement where two important players will stake out each end of this spectrum.  Mario Piacentini of OECD will present their “macro-level” system, showing the key questions, problems, and gaps, as well as showing us how OECD is developing solutions.  At the “micro” end, Noa Gimelli of ExxonMobil will discuss the ways that their programs have sought to measure impact in an arena of economics where few have travelled before them.

Other details of the Power Shift Forum are available here.

To be sure, assistance and support for women’s economic participation in all aspects and in every country is needed and appreciated.  But, around the world, there are emerging many different forms of collective action taken by groups of female entrepreneurs who have banded together to work for their mutual interests.  It’s a whole new phenomenon of female activism.

One of the most impressive of these groups is Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP) in the United States.  I heard their president, Barbara Kasoff, speak at the Global Sourcing for Women Vendors meeting in Mexico City last fall.  Wow!  What a powerhouse!

WIPP is an active and effective coalition focused on getting the governments in the US to facilitate women-owned businesses.  They have a focused, articulated plan:  you can read the executive summary here.  There should be an organization like WIPP hounding every government in the world, as far as I am concerned.

So you can imagine how pleased I was when Gloria Larkin wrote spontaneously saying she would like to come to the Power Shift Forum.  Not only is Gloria a board member of WIPP, she is a leading authority on getting government contracts.  She has written a book that is absolutely the last word on how to sell stuff to the biggest consumer in the world: the United States of America.

When Francisca Valdez co-founded Mujeres Empresarias in Chile, there was no organization for women in business.  Today, they have 3,500 members, most of whom are entrepreneurs, but some are executives.  This organization has focused on having members from all industry sectors and on getting press coverage of women’s business activities.  Indeed, the leading Chilean newspaper, El Mercurio, now produces an annual feature on the 100 leading women in business. Though Mujeres Empresarias recognizes, as we all do, the need for governments to ameliorate the harms to women in the domains of violence and poverty, they have also effectively lobbied their ministries to begin programs aimed at empowerment, especially economically, not just protection. They have also entered into issues that are normally not addressed by women’s entrepreneurship organizations, such as the need to get more women on corporate boards.  So, again, we have a whole new breed of activism, working on several fronts.

Pacita Juan is a new member of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance, about which my student, Mary Johnstone-Louis, has just written a case study.  But in the Philippines, Pacita is not only a highly admired and successful entrepreneur, she was head of the Philippine Coffee Board and is president of the Women’s Business Council.  In other words, her leadership activities cross several organizational forms, national and international, coffee and non-coffee, women and men.

Each of these women is actively engaged in changing the environment for women-owned businesses, at home and abroad.  Each of them represents a group of other women who are not waiting to be rescued, but are reaching out, not only to help themselves, but to help others as well.

I am pleased that they will be on a panel discussing “Collective Action” at the Power Shift Forum next week, in a session moderated by Dr. Izzy Warren-Smith of Harper Adams University. More details about the Forum can be found here.

Larkin opens with very practical advice about starting your own business:  from whether you are suited to being an entrepreneur to how to deal with the taxes, she is straightforward, friendly and thorough.

She goes on to sketch out how the government sees small businesses, as well as how the government is organized, from a seller’s point of view.  Then, step-by-step you go through the way the feds buy goods.  And then how to market to them.  Then there are three chapters of advice about strategy, getting to know the right people, and basic do’s and don’ts.

The Basic Guide to Government Contracting has got to be the go-to book on this topic.  Clear, accessible, complete, straightforward.

Caring for children affects women's entrepreneurship--and, indeed, all their economic choices--around the world.

I have felt frustrated many times during the past year when planning the Power Shift Forum.  A frequent source was that folks at the Said School–consistent with B-School and corporate types in the West generally–want to view entrepreneurship for women as a matter of turning up the skills and turning on the financing.  They, along with most of those who research entrepreneurship in universities, want to think of the business world as a gender neutral place and the “underperformance” of female entrepreneurs as a consequence of poor individual choices or psychological  inferiority (the famous “lack of confidence”).

To people with this view, matters of religion, family, law, and custom are, at best, noise in the machine and, at worst, silly matters that serious women don’t think about.  And violence is a complete irrelevancy.

We know, though, that upticks in domestic violence have accompanied microfinance programs in the developing world.  And that religion tracks, with disturbing consistency, in an inverse relationship with women’s empowerment.  Finally, study after study points at the profound role that family plays in the reasons women become entrepreneurs, the decisions they make about their businesses, and their ultimate plans for how or whether to grow it.

So, at the Power Shift Forum, there will be only one session covering these issues, but it may very well be the most important session of all.  I have no doubt whatsoever that matters of family, law, and religion (as well as violence) will surface over and over in every other session–because they always do–so we will have at least one moment where we can focus on these core drivers.

We are lucky to have four extraordinary women leading the discussion.  Joanna Foster, who is currently Chair of the Crafts Council and formerly Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission in the United Kingdom, will moderate, but I hope will jump into the discussion herself from time to time.  Alyse Nelson, CEO of Vital Voices, tells me she has plenty to say about these matters, especially violence, after all the work her organization has done in the developing world (her book has some very no-nonsense passages on the problem of violence, see the review here). Renée Giovarelli, executive director of Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights, is working on an issue that cannot be overemphasized–property rights reach out into every kind of economic right: to hold property, to earn money, to be economically autonomous.  Professor Qing Wang, Warwick University, has done research on the motivations of women in China becoming entrepreneurs.  In most countries, the main reason women choose entrepreneurship is that they think it will, one way or another, make it easier to care for children.

So you can see that these things are very important, indeed!

More details on the Power Shift Forum, including session descriptions and book reviews, can be found here.

Vital Voices:  The Power of Women Leading Change Around the World

I must say that the word “leadership” in the discourse around women in business has, in my opinion, become hackneyed.  It’s like “natural” when connected to potato chips, a word that is, more likely than not, connected to something insincere and profit-seeking.

But Alyse Nelson’s stories remind us of what a breath-taking thing true leadership is.  It is not a popularity contest nor is it a climb to personal advantage, but an eyes-wide-shut leap, born of a sense of responsibility to others.  In these stories, that sense of responsibility is usually coming out of a painful confrontation with the horrors that still form women’s lives all around the world.

For instance, Marina Pisklakova built a network to help victims of domestic violence in Russia.  She began in a moment of recognition that comes close to the purest insight.  She read two letters sent to her research project at the Russian Academy of Science, a project that focused on identifying issues of concern to women.  These two letters told stories of a phenomenon that then had no name in Russia–what we call “domestic violence” in English.  As she began asking more questions, women all around her told stories that convinced her she had discovered a massive problem that the police denied even existed. Recognizing the truth of something for which your culture has no name is a feat of imagination that we normally ascribe to poets and visionaries–and real leaders (not rich corporate puppets).  Twenty years later, Marina’s network had assisted 200,000 women escaping violence at home.

Sex slavery is something most of us just don’t want to think about.  But it is such a huge problem in the world today.  Millions of girls are forced into it, subjected to terrible cruelty and degradation.  Sunitha Krishnan of India was gang-raped herself–by eight men at the age of 15.  Can you imagine?  Instead of retreating into herself (as many of us might have done), Sunitha instead began building a series of shelters and schools.  She focused on the children of women in prostitution and others vulnerable to brothels.  To help reintegrate those rescued from slavery–who are often ostracized–she began retraining programs that have helped hundreds of survivors to get good jobs.  Finally, she works with state authorities to help shape prevention policies.

Slave rescue is a very risky business indeed.  Only the worst kinds of people engage in it and, because it is very lucrative, they don’t intend to be stopped.  Sunitha has been attacked many times and frequently receives death threats.  To withstand that kind of pressure is actual courage.

The vignettes are well-written and inspiring.  It was refreshing to be reminded–working as I do in a world where “leadership” is too often reduced to getting a promotion–of who the real world sees as leaders.

Alyse Nelson will be joining the “Family, Law, and Customs” panel at the Power Shift Forum next week and will be available to sign copies of her book at lunch on Tuesday, 21st May.

For more details about the Power Shift Forum, please click here.  For more reviews of the books to be sold and signed, please click here.

As well as the terrifying challenges that still face women around the world today.

Women became disproportionately illiterate, in the conventional sense, a pattern that can still be measured in most of the world. But they also would have become disproportionately financially illiterate, a measurement we are only just now learning to make.  From the time of the Mesopotamian cuneiform, women have been consistently excluded from the “texts” of commerce, whether those were deeds or contracts or, often, wills.  Yes, there have been exceptions, but this has been the overall pattern around the world.

Dr. Marc Ventresca, my colleague at Said, and Professor Zhongming Wang, teaching in the Goldman Sachs program in China.

Grappling with financial literacy–and basic business skills–is not just some superficial private sector add-on, but confronts the very core of the system that disadvantages women globally.  It is a central aspect of the gender gap.

Several governments, agencies, and corporations are tackling this issue, but one at the forefront is Goldman Sachs. Their 10,000 Women program focuses on the underserved women in developing economies, while their 10,000 Small Businesses reaches women and men in the United States and the United Kingdom.  At Oxford, we are engaged in both sides of the GS effort, as the faculty teaches in both the UK and China courses.

So, it made sense to ask the two people at Goldman Sachs who run these programs to speak to the Power Shift group about the challenges, unique to each or common to both, and to address the circumstances of teaching in a same sex versus mixed sex setting.  Noa Meyer and Deepak Jayaraman will cover the whole issue of skills in a session moderated by Jim Hall, the director of Oxford’s Entrepreneurship Center.

First of all, the images in the video are the tough ones.  Not pretty pictures of airbrushed poverty, but news coverage of marches, protests of violence, even tears. Second, it includes men in the voices for change. (You don’t need to have breasts to know injustice when you see it.) Finally, it pulls in celebrity in a way that makes sense:  Salma Hayek, Frida Giannini, and Beyoncé put their voices together behind education, health, and justice–hence, chimes for change.

Gucci/Chime for Change is working through Catapult, another innovation.  Catapult came on the scene just a few months ago, launched by WomenDeliver. It has the distinction of being the first crowd-funding site focused on gender equality.  Catapult works like Kiva or Kickstarter, but the projects are all about helping women and girls.