BACKING FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS

When Startup Queenstown Lakes chief executive Olivia Wensley attended her first founders’ dinner two years ago, she looked around the table and realised it was her and 14 men.

I thought, ‘OK, this doesn’t stack up’, and made it my mission to get more women around the table,” Wensley says.

Startup Queenstown Lakes has focused on inclusive branding.

There’s no shortage of “brilliant women with wonderful business ideas” she says. “But they’re not backing themselves for some reason. They tend to talk themselves out of it.” And it’s not a problem that is unique to Queenstown Lakes. In New Zealand as a whole, only 2% of companies backed by venture capital funding have a female founder. “That’s absolutely shocking,” she says. “But you peel back another level and see the venture capitalist space is dominated by men.”

SQL is tackling the problem in two ways. The first is to make its own messaging and programmes as inclusive and approachable as possible, to dispel the idea start-ups are just for ‘tech bros’.

“I’m a firm believer in ‘you can’t be what you don’t see’, so we’ve been very conscious around our branding, our marketing, using images with women and men, and having a female CEO likely also helps.”

That’s worked so far. A huge number of women have joined SQL’s programmes, ranging from 55% to 75% of the intake.

Social Impact Workshop put on by Startup Queenstown Lakes.

“The 75% was over Covid when a disproportionate number of women were losing their jobs, something like 80% of redundancies were women. So, some decided, okay, I’m going to create my own job, my own company.”

The second approach, both locally and coordinating on a national level, is to encourage more women to become angel investors. “In Scotland, the Government is spending £60 million over five years to educate women on being investors, and backing female founders, and so far, for every pound invested they’re getting a 61x return.”

Wensley says women tend to live longer than men and have capital to invest. “And they can understand companies with ideas targeted at women.” More angel investors correlates to more female founders, able to create businesses aimed at an untapped market, 50% of the population. The two-pronged approach is working so far. At the most recent founders’ dinner, the gender breakdown was 50-50.

Story created in partnership QT Business Magazine & written by Paul Taylor.