Women entrepreneurs are set to uphold India’s digital future
4 min read . Updated: 07 Mar 2023, 11:34 PM IST
PremiumEmpowerment by online platforms has boosted our business prospects and formed an alliance of mutually reinforced growth.
In 2020, I was tasked with leading Meta’s gaming vertical in the Asia-Pacific region. Upon starting my new role, I immediately noticed a significant problem. Women accounted for almost half of all gamers worldwide, but authentic depictions of them and their experiences in games were scarce.
It quickly became apparent why: representation on the screen required diversity behind the scenes, and women accounted for less than a quarter of the gaming industry’s workforce. Helping foster an environment for women to enter and stay in the gaming industry, therefore, became a core part of my role.
It’s exciting being back in India after many years and to witness the dynamism of the startup ecosystem and our country’s incredible digital transformation up close. India’s formal sector is producing some of the world’s top business leaders and the country boasts of over a hundred unicorn-sized startups, but still lacks women’s representation.
When women come online, they are able to multiply economic opportunities, set innovative ideas in motion, and become catalysts for social change. Their exclusion, on the other hand, can severely hamper economic growth. As per the
UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2022 report, women’s exclusion from the digital world has taken away $1 trillion from the gross domestic product (GDP of low- and middle-income countries in the last decade. This is reinforced by a McKinsey Global Institute report that found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality.
While the perspectives of women at every level of the professional world are vital, having women business leaders and entrepreneurs ensures that infrastructure and attitudes necessary to bring more women into the workforce are prioritized.
India is home to 63 million micro businesses, of which only 20% are women-owned. Achieving gender parity in entrepreneurship is a tough mountain to scale, but it can be achieved through conscious and consistent effort. We need to design our systems to be more conducive towards diversity, while also breaking down the barriers—such as limited access to working capital, training and technology—that have typically held women back.
At Meta, we have created programmes to attract, include and support female founders and other underrepresented or vulnerable communities.
For Farida Khan, who runs Delhi-based Pehchan Education Centre, digital tools are crucial to her mission of educating underprivileged women. When India first went into lockdown on account of the covid pandemic, Khan’s classes ground to a halt. However, through the use of WhatsApp voice and video calling, she was able to get her students back on track. This year, nearly 40 girls at Pehchan will appear for class 10 and 12 examinations, with some even set to graduate college.
Access to working capital is another important way to empower India’s women entrepreneurs. At Meta, our credit initiative offers collateral-free loans at pre-defined interest rates to our small business advertisers through third-party lenders. The programme also provides partially or wholly women-owned businesses a small reduction in interest rate charges.
This access to finance has been transformative for many female entrepreneurs. Take Raipur’s Neha Tandon Sharma, for instance. The founder and CEO of inclusive fashion brand Isadora Life, Sharma struggled to access finance to grow her business in its early days due to her lack of a strong credit history. She finally secured a loan through our loans initiative, which helped her business grow by 25% in the following seven months.
That kick-start has seen Isadora Life’s sales grow 800% between 2019 and 2022, defying even covid’s gravity.
Sharma and Khan are a few examples of women entrepreneurs flourishing across the Meta ecosystem. In India, 73% of Instagram business accounts that self-identify as women-owned business were set up in the last three years. And, 53% of all business pages on Facebook in the country with women admins were also set up during the same period.
Like Sharma, we are also seeing many women entrepreneurs emerge from smaller towns and expand nationally and globally. Meta’s XR Startup Program in collaboration with the ministry of electronics and information technology, currently supports 40 early stage startups, of which 30% are from tier-2 and -3 markets, and 20% of them have women founders. With Extended Reality (XR) technologies slated for massive growth, it becomes important to ensure that women have a seat at the table as we build the next iteration of the internet.
As we celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March, there is one more area that is the need of the hour which digital platforms are perfectly positioned to foster—a supportive community for women to elevate and encourage each other. We’re inspired every day by the incredible examples of community that our platforms enable, and to me, that’s where the strength lies of digital technologies.
As the famous proverb says, “If you wanna go fast, go alone; if you wanna go far, go together."