The Simplest Way to Get More Girls to Become Entrepreneurs

This expert opinion by the contributor Jessica Stillman was originally published on Inc.com.

Mark Zuckerberg recently told Joe Rogan that Facebook needs more “masculine energy.” But if you look at the numbers, the fields of tech and entrepreneurship actually need a lot more feminine energy. 

Entrepreneurship’s Missing Women Problem 

While the number of female entrepreneurs has been increasing worldwide in recent years, women makeup half the population but still found only a third of businesses globally. The situation is even gloomier in the world of high-growth startups, like Facebook once was—only one in five has at least one female founder, as of 2021. 

That gap is a bummer for women who miss out on building wealth through business creation, but it’s also bad for the economy as a whole. Entrepreneurial gender gaps “cost economies in missed opportunities for job creation, growth, and innovation,” warns the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

All of which raises the obvious question: How do we get more women to pursue entrepreneurship? There are a lot of answers to this question at the social and political level, things as finding ways to lighten women’s burden at home (looking at you, men) and improving their access to capital. 

But a massive recent study suggested a simple but powerful way individuals can help close the female entrepreneurship gap (or just nudge girls in their orbit to dream of starting a business): Make sure teen girls spend time with entrepreneurs. 

How to inspire more girls to become entrepreneurs 

Advocates for more visible diversity love the slogan, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” It’s catchy. But is it true? Are kids really less likely to aspire to roles if they don’t know anyone in those roles? 

That sounds like a hard question to test rigorously. But an international team, including researchers from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, and the Queen Mary University of London, found a way. 

Denmark, it turns out, keeps impressively detailed records of young people’s social circles, educational choices, and later career outcomes. Examining the life paths of more than 750,000 Danish teens over decades, the researchers asked what differences in girls’ teen years made them more likely to become entrepreneurs later on. 

One factor stood out: exposure to entrepreneurs, either in their own families or in the families of their friends.  

“Girls were four percent more likely to launch their own business by the age of 35 when 16.7 percent of their female classmates had entrepreneur parents, compared with when 5.3 percent of their classmates did,” Kellogg Insight reports. “Girls who had an entrepreneur parent were as much as 59.3 percent more likely to become an entrepreneur by age 35.” 

The businesses of female entrepreneurs who had early exposure to other entrepreneurs also outperformed those of female entrepreneurs who did not. 

Takeaways For Parents And Entrepreneurs 

It’s no huge shock that having parents who are entrepreneurs makes a girl more likely to become an entrepreneur. I’m willing to bet that if you crunched numbers, you’d find children of doctors or electricians are more likely to become doctors or electricians, too. More surprising is that just having friends whose parents are entrepreneurs had such a significant effect. 

“These effects are quite sizable,” wrote study co-author Maddalena Ronchi. This makes for an interesting takeaway for both parents and entrepreneurs reading this. 

The message for parents is pretty simple. If you’d like to encourage your daughters to consider entrepreneurship as a career path, make sure they get to know some entrepreneurs during those crucial teen years. This study suggests that a friend’s parent, a neighbor, or a family acquaintance who runs a business can have an impact. As a parent, you can help curate that exposure. 

The lesson for entrepreneurs is equally straightforward: You have more influence than you probably realize. Just by walking around and existing, you can expand girls’ sense of their own possibilities. The more teen girls you get to know, the more impact you can have. 

Maybe it’s time to increase your visibility by talking at a school career day, sponsoring a girls' sports team, or offering internships to teens.