http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethmacbr... In the past several months, I’ve met a handful of dynamic women entrepreneurs in the Middle East, from Raina Seddik , to Maria Sanchez Munoz, who co-founded fashion startup Slickr, to Rania Abdalla of Aspire HR. (I haven’t written yet about the latter two, but expect to). I’ve also found that women are overrepresented in computer science classes in the Middle East, such as in this story: U.S. Lags The World When It Comes To Women And Technology.
In the Middle East, a preliminary survey of seven universities in countries including Palestine, the UAE and Saudi Arabia by Sana Odeh, clinical professor of computer science at New York University, found 30-70% of the enrollees in computer science programs were women.
So what to make of the recent report on women’s entrepreneurship worldwide by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor at Babson College? As in 2012, it found that women in the Middle East have high intentions to become entrepreneurs, but among the lowest regional averages for actually becoming entrepreneurs — and among the largest regional gender gaps.
First of all, this time around, the report studied only three countries in the Middle East: Israel, Kuwait and Qatar, which it called innovation-driven economies.
But the report also showed again how it’s impossible to draw easy conclusions about women entrepreneurs in a region that Americans typically think of as repressive toward women. The picture is just more complicated than it seems: So for instance, while Qatar, Kuwait and Israel have lower rates of entrepreneurship than most other regions, guess which region is rock bottom? Europe. The numbers: 8% versus 5-6% in Europe.
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Among the other conclusions:
In the innovation-driven Middle East economies, women are proportionately more likely to have opportunity motives, but the gender gap suggests that few start relative to men and rarely out of necessity. In other words, women start businesses because they want to, not because they need to.
This finding in the report may reflect the affluent countries that it focused on in the Gulf region, and Israel. Women in those affluent countries may see entrepreneurship as a route to power. “The three Middle East economies all report female opportunity-motivation rates higher than those of their male counterparts,” the report said.
The highest prevalence of women entrepreneurs operating in teams was in the Middle East (27%). The report suggests that women who work in teams have the highest aspirations for creating jobs. Overall, though, women entrepreneurs worldwide have fewer aspirations for creating jobs. That could reflect the changing nature of tech startups: Many of them don’t need big teams to run successfully or sustain themselves.
Posted By: Chris Presby
Tuesday, December 1st 2015 at 9:53AM
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