Girls must be brought up with financial literacy: KSUM summit
Kochi / March 6, 2023
Kochi, Mar 06: Financial literacy needs to focus on women by grooming them in savings, ownership of property and investment matters right from the formative years, according to a national conclave aimed at creating a dynamic early-stage investment ecosystem.
While boys are brought up with constant tips on making money, earning assets and starting business, girls are deprived of such an upbringing in the vast majority of families in the country. Such is their subsequent allegiance to a ‘family first’ attitude that women are checked from rising to their potential in careers. This warrants a structural change that can make the country’s workforce more gender-inclusive, experts noted at ‘Seeding Kerala’ organized in the city by Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) today.
Conventional beliefs that women own the primary responsibility of raising children make it tough for mothers to return to jobs and resume career on par with the men in the field, experts noted at the event KSUM convened in the city with the aim of provides high net-worth individuals an opportunity to network with leading investors, angel networks, peer HNIs and nascent firms across the country.
At a session on ‘Bridging the Gender Disparity in Startup Funding’, successful founders and strategic angels noted that even highly-educated women in India generally continue to take a backseat in the professional arena, giving priority to household matters. The country is yet to have an abundant pool of role-models, they regretted, while agreeing that the situation is bettering in more recent years.
Divya Sampath of AWE Funds observed that women are increasingly becoming the decision-makers on family spending and savings, yet very few of them have a voice in investment decisions. “Once there is some shift in this pattern, the country will see a rise in the number of women entrepreneurs,” she noted. “To those women who often find male domination choking their career growth, I would suggest, ‘Why don’t you open your own venture and be the boss?’. It can make a huge difference in your lives.”
In Kerala, the picture is particularly bad when the state’s female workforce participation rate is only 20 per cent, while women account for 52 per cent of the population, she added at the 35-minute discussion moderated by KSUM Chief Operating Officer Tom Thomas.
Bhawna Bhatnagar of Noida-based We Founder Circle said the country’s tier-II and III cities show more volume of female investors compared to the metropolises. “Even so, women-only startups largely fail to get sufficient funding vis-à-vis those run by men,” she added.
Ankita Satpathy of InfoEdge Ventures in Gurgaon of the National Capital Territory said gender biases frustrate women, more so when their careers undergo long breaks following pregnancy and maternity. “This, when some of them are more qualified and competent than their male colleagues,” she noted.
Kruti Raiyani of Lead Angels said ecosystems should look at women as individuals, instead of dividing them on grounds of gender. “The competent in any workforce should be given the opportunity to rise,” she added.
KSUM is the Kerala government’s nodal agency for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in the state.
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