Essay
Elaine France*
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Consultant, Founder of Flow In Action and Flourishing Futures Collective, and Futures Thinking Guide, University of Geneva, Geneva School of Economics & Management, The Geneva Responsible Entrepreneurship Center, Geneva, Switzerland
Abstract
This essay is a personal exploration of the future of women’s entrepreneurship, using causal layered analysis and scenarios, to experience developing new metaphors to catalyse women entrepreneurs beyond current eco-system barriers in response to the climate emergency.
Keywords
Feminist Futures, Women’s Entrepreneurship, Causal Layered Analysis, Scenario Planning, Climate Emergency.
Introduction
This essay sets out a personal exploration, as a woman entrepreneur and specialist working in social innovation and entrepreneurship eco-systems for 30 years, investigating the future of women’s entrepreneurship. Using causal layered analysis and scenarios, the purpose of this exploration was to experience developing new metaphors as catalysts to move past current barriers and respond to the climate emergency.
Context
In the Age of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), it is widely recognized that women are increasingly more vulnerable to the impacts of the climate emergency as a driver of change (UNFCCC, 2022) (Asian Development Bank, n.d.). With the ever-growing risks of disrupted livelihoods, increased displacement and forced migration (UN IOM, n.d.), the urgency to take action as women entrepreneurs, by creating climate and sustainability solutions, feels visceral.
Asking, “What is the future of women’s entrepreneurship over the next ten years?” is an entry point into breaking down the barriers in today’s innovation and entrepreneurship eco-systems, which prevent and slow down our capacity to act. Barriers such as old narratives and perceptions around our capacity to deliver, lack of equal access to funding, to bank accounts, to land rights, to visibility in digital landscapes and to coaching and mentoring, in order to create economic empowerment for ourselves and employment opportunities for others.
When speaking with women of all ages across innovation and entrepreneurship networks about these barriers, there is agreement that it is exhausting and lonely. Echoing Milojević (Milojević, 2024), repeatedly experiencing these barriers, brings a hesitancy in being visible. Moreover, there is a real sense of lacking metaphors that provide us with guidance and support.
Recognizing this, was a call to action. Thus, the context of the exploration was to experience Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) (Inayatullah, 1998) as a woman entrepreneur, whilst applying a gender lens (Milojević & Inayatullah, 1998), in order to develop compelling metaphors which might galvanize action over fear.
A Heroine’s Quest
To be able to engage other women entrepreneurs and eco-system stakeholders, required this experiential learning journey: a deeply personal heroine’s quest (Milojević, 2024) inwards, to challenge my own assumptions and blind spots.
As a woman entrepreneur focused on creating climate and sustainability solutions, when undertaking different projects, such as creating an e-learning for women as digital green entrepreneurs (UN ITU Academy, n.d.), the systemic barriers are revealed immediately. Despite my own career experience, less than ten years ago, when I was in my mid-forties, I was told by the man at the Commune who held the power over my work permit as an immigrant that, “A woman your age should stay home, be married and have babies.” It was an utterly humiliating and diminishing moment.
As Ivana Milojević highlights (Milojević, 2024), these types of barriers continue to entrench an epistemological, cultural and structural gender-based violence. As women entrepreneurs, we feel this as a deep grief (Macy & Johnstone, 2022), of being in present-day systems that make us both vulnerable to the climate emergency whilst also hampering us from creating solutions: they routinely disconnect us from Nature and then force us to disown futures (Inayatullah, 2008) where our Mother Earth Centric (UNEP Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022) innovation might have enabled us, and our communities, to flourish.
Focus on Funding as a Current Issue
Research reveals that there is no shortage of women with the courage and creativity to start an enterprise (World Economic Forum, 2023). However, access to funding, remains a common challenge for women entrepreneurs who routinely receive less (UBS, n.d.).
By drawing on research, as well as collating and curating insights of lived experiences shared by women entrepreneurs in my workshops, trainings, conferences and events over the last 15 years, a Futures Triangle was populated.
Based on this, setting out the current issue was the starting point of discovery: creating a Preferred Future with new perspectives unlocked hope as an essential positive emotion (Fredrickson, 2004).
| Table 1: CLA Compiled by Author | ||
| CLA | Current Issue | Preferred Future 2034 |
| Litany | Women entrepreneurs do not speak the same financial language as funders, so receive less funding. | Women entrepreneurs and funders have a shared language for funding in a world that seeks to meet climate action targets. |
| System | Most funders/Venture Capitalists (VCs) are men.
Focus of investment remains on Return on Investment (ROI) x 10, rather than wellbeing economic indicators. In some countries, women are not allowed to receive capital. |
Focus of investment ROI aligns with wellbeing economy indicators. Women have equal access to capital. More women are investors themselves, belonging to gender-smart investment cooperatives. |
| Worldview | Lack of financial and economic literacy in nearly all start-ups: systemic education issue for women and girls is lack of Science, Tech, Economics, Maths (STEM) literacy. | Women Entrepreneurs are ‘safe’ investments because they have entrepreneurial competencies (Joint Research Centre EC, 2016), aligned with green, equitable futures for all. |
| Myth/Metaphor | Women entrepreneurs are too nice. They don’t have “Wolf of Wall Street” approach, which means that they fail. | Women entrepreneurs are ‘Gaia’s Treasurers’ aligning their businesses with ecological economics (Pirgmaier & Steinberger, 2019) having disrupted status quo growth models, generating livelihoods for themselves and others. |
Taking an Integrated Approach
As a metaphor for a Preferred Future, ‘Gaia’s Treasurers’ felt inspirational, representing the social and economic power of women entrepreneurs to lead and implement transformational change for a new eco-social contract (UNRISD, 2022). It embodied a sense of gender equity.
However, the prospect of using this metaphor widely in today’s world was anxiety-inducing. To be so explicitly feminist and connected to Nature, created a sense of fear in the present because of increasing attacks on: climate activists (Tabbush & Turquet, 2024), the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and women’s rights (Basiouny, 2024).
I wanted to know if exploring alternative futures would help to navigate past this. Using the Integrated Scenarios method enabled further Causal Layered Analysis outlines to be developed: from the preferred to disowned, integrated and outlier. Using a Futures Wheel to explore the litany of each future, meant that systems could be outlined, starting to bring to life the scenarios.
| Table 2: CLA underpinning integrated scenarios. Compiled by the author. | ||||
| CLA | Preferred Future 2034 | Disowned Future 2034 | Integrated Future 2034 | Outlier Future 2034 |
| Litany | Women entrepreneurs and funders have a shared language for funding in a world that seeks to meet climate action targets. | Even though the global focus is on Sustainable Finance, funders continue to use their historical financial language around growth models when investing. They are frustrated at women entrepreneurs’ ability to engage. | Growing awareness of the challenging relationship between women entrepreneurs and funders is being tackled because achieving climate targets is all everyone wants to do. | Women entrepreneurs have stopped waiting for funding systems to be fully favorable. They by-pass systems and continue to evolve a new global eco-social contract. |
| System | Focus of investment ROI aligns with wellbeing economy indicators.
Women have equal access to capital. More women are investors themselves, belonging to gender-smart investment cooperatives. |
Sustainable Finance focuses on climate solutions with growth models in mind.
Focus of investment remains on ROI x 10 and finding unicorns. There is not a strong pipeline of women entrepreneurs, due to lack of STEM and Entrepreneurial Education investment by governments in education systems. UN training programs focus on a new eco-social contract and Contract with Nature with huge take-up by women feeling the effects of climate change. Funders ignore calls for alignment with wellbeing economy indicators. |
Gender-smart Investors engage with the wider funding community to activate changes in perspectives and build understanding.
More funders invest in women start-ups but with more conditions than those applied to a male or mixed founding team. As more women continue to inherit wealth (Corbett, 2024) (World Economic Forum, 2024), there is growth in the number of women VCs who spearhead new behaviors, processes and ways of engaging women entrepreneurs Women entrepreneurs focus their energy on climate solutions. |
Women entrepreneurs are fully focused on creating climate solutions, especially at a local level.
Women entrepreneurs have created crowd-funding cooperatives to invest in each other. Gender-smart investing, especially by women as investors continues to grow (2xGlobal, n.d.). Women also don’t wait for funding, they just get started through necessity, using open-source digital products such as Arduino (Arduino, n.d.) to create hyper-local climate solutions. In response to the women entrepreneurs, the ageing male Tech Titans of the 2020s attempt to ban gender-responsive SEO on websites. |
| Worldview | Women Entrepreneurs are ‘safe’ investments because they have entrepreneurial competencies (Joint Research Centre EC, 2016), aligned with green, equitable futures for all. | Funders invest with 2050 climate targets in mind, perpetuating the status quo models whilst looking for radical innovation and unicorns. Women continue to struggle to access funding. | Funding climate solutions is seen as essential. Working together for the greater good is the way forward.
However, some funders perceive women entrepreneurs to now have an unfair advantage and question whether they earned it. |
Women entrepreneurs learn from each other and fund each other. They just give it a go, rather than waiting for formal systems to empower them. |
| Myth/
Metaphor |
Women entrepreneurs are ‘Gaia’s Treasurers’ aligning their businesses with ecological economics (Pirgmaier & Steinberger, 2019) having disrupted status quo growth models, generating livelihoods for themselves and others. | ‘Moving Goal-Posts’. | ‘We Go Together’. | We stopped ‘Waiting for Godot’ (Beckett, 1952) and so ‘We Move Mountains’. |
An Outlier Future Scenario: ‘We Move Mountains’
The integrated futures scenario felt positive but the unexpected element of the outlier scenario felt more tangible, cutting through the noise of formal systems. This future could emerge because as women entrepreneurs, we simply stopped this existential wait for formal systems to empower us.
In essence, we stopped ‘Waiting for Godot’ and by taking ownership of our power, ‘We Move Mountains’ to create transformational change.
As women entrepreneurs, finding resonance in a scenario and all of its parts – from headline to indicators to myth and metaphor – is to find ourselves reflected and our voices heard. Some characteristics then, of this unexpected future, are that as women entrepreneurs, we:
- Stopped waiting for someone or something to come along and give us permission or approval to act.
- Are gender-smart investors in each other.
- Secure funding because future impact is measured on a solution’s alignment with wellbeing economy indicators and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators.
In this scenario, it is envisioned that women entrepreneurs:
- Form local, national and global cooperatives to crowd-fund climate solutions.
- Develop other new gender-smart financial instruments together.
- Create hyper-local and easily replicable climate solutions in homes, work places and communities using affordable sensors and open-source kits, such as Arduino, connecting to the Internet of Things (IoT).
- Use Virtual and Alternative Reality immersive futures scenarios to explore impact and create ‘power with’ relationships with funders.
- Have the funding to unfold solutions that contribute to making nature and people-centric economic models a reality (Raworth, 2017) (Mazzucato, 2022).
In this future, as a woman entrepreneur, I would look back to this moment, to this first compelling metaphor – ‘We Move Mountains’ – as the one that served as a personal catalyst to step around the barriers, beyond the hesitancy, to galvanize action, to take the mission to women entrepreneurs.
Conclusion
The outcome of this personal exploration? Certainly, a compelling metaphor used as a starting point for engaging women entrepreneurs in new perspectives around responding to the climate emergency and overcoming current obstacles.
Moreover, this is the start of a heroine’s quest, not the end of one. The immersion in CLA and scenario creation, unlocks an alchemical process that transforms us as individuals. Unleashing the power of women entrepreneurs as leaders of climate solutions will come through the agency that the methodology’s structure provides, making safe spaces for narratives, facts, assumptions, emotions and lived experiences and imagining different ways forward.
In these spaces, as women entrepreneurs, we will come face-to-face with our own value and the value that we bring, have the freedom to safely express and describe how we want to meet our needs; and create metaphors and scenarios that represent us, our solutions and our impact, as echoes of futures that we will unfold together.
References
Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. (2000). The “Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter, 41.
UNFCCC. (2022). Dimensions and examples of the gender-differentiated impacts of climate change, the role of women as agents of change and opportunities for women. Synthesis report by the secretariat. FCCC/SBI/2022/7. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/sbi2022_07
Asian Development Bank. (n.d.). Gender Equality and Development. https://www.adb.org/projects
UN International Organisation for Migration (IOM). (n.d.) Gender, Migration, Environment and Climate Change. https://environmentalmigration.iom.int/gender-migration-environment-and-climate-change
Milojević, I. (2024). THE HESITANT FEMINIST’S GUIDE TO THE FUTURE. Tamkang University Press. https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Monograph_Hesitant-Feminist.pdf
Inayatulluah, S. (1998). Causal Layered Analysis: Poststructuralism as method. Futures, 30 (8), 815-829. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-3287(98)00086-X
Milojević, I., & Inayatullah, S. (1998). Feminist Critiques and Visions of the Future. Futures Research Quarterly, 14 (1), 35-46. https://www.metafuture.org/pdf/feministvisions-frq.pdf
Milojević, I. (2024). THE HESITANT FEMINIST’S GUIDE TO THE FUTURE. Tamkang University Press. https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Monograph_Hesitant-Feminist.pdf
UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU). (n.d). ITU Academy. Green and Digital Entrepreneurship for Women. https://academy.itu.int/training-courses/full-catalogue/green-and-digital-entrepreneurship-women
Milojević, I. (2024). THE HESITANT FEMINIST’S GUIDE TO THE FUTURE. Tamkang University Press. https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Monograph_Hesitant-Feminist.pdf
Macy, J., & Johnstone, C. (Revised ed. 2022). Active Hope. How to Face the Mess We’re In with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power. New World Library.
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six Pillars: futures thinking for transforming. Foresight. 10 (1). DOI 10.1108/14636680810855991. https://www.metafuture.org/library1/FuturesStudies/Six-pillars-Foresight-2008.pdf
UNEP Convention on Biological Diversity. (2022). Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. https://www.cbd.int/gbf
World Economic Forum. (2023, April 20). Women Entrepreneurs are fuelling US business growth – here’s how. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/04/women-entrepreneurship-business-growth-jobs
UBS. (n.d.). The funding gap.
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/women/insights/2021/funding-gap
Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1367–1377. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4142140
Joint Research Centre EC. EU Science Hub. (2016). EntreComp: The Entrepreneurial Competence Framework. https://www.joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/
Pirgmaier, E., & Steinberger, J. K. (2019). Riots, and Radical Change—A Road Less Travelled for Ecological Economics. Sustainability 2019, 11(7), 2001. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072001
UNRISD. (2022). Flagship Report—Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract.
https://cdn.unrisd.org/assets/library/reports/2022/overview-unrisd-flagship-report-2022
Tabbush, C., & Turquet, L. (2024, March 19). Op-Ed: Building Accountability to Achieve Feminist Climate Justice. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/op-ed/2024/03/
Basiouny, A. (2024, June 10). Is DEI Going Away? Here’s What Experts Say. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-dei-going-away-heres-what-experts-say/
Corbett, H. (2024, February 29). The Great Wealth Transfer: What It Means For Women And For The World. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollycorbett/2024/02/29/the-great-wealth-transfter-what-it-means-for-women-and-for-the-world
World Economic Forum. (2024, July 19). The Great Wealth Transfer: Here’s how women can make the most of it. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/07/women-inheritance-great-wealth-transfer
2XGlobal. (n.d.). Gender-Smart Capital. https://www.2xglobal.org/
Arduino. (n.d.) https://www.arduino.cc
Beckett, S. (2010). Waiting for Godot. Faber & Faber. (Original Work published 1952).
Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Random House.
Mazzucato, M. (2022). Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Penguin.