The other day, over dinner, my friend told me a very familiar story. About how she needs to start thinking seriously about the prospect of her business failing next year.
Not because she’s not selling a lot of products to a lot of customers.
But because she has trouble securing funding.
- If women can’t get capital in a capitalist society, we are kind of screwed, she sighed pretending to be cool about it.
And I let her.
Then we ate A LOT of cheese.
When it comes to funding and women the facts are indeed BRUTAL:
Less than 1 per cent of venture-capital funds in the UK go to start-ups founded by women.
For every pound of venture-capital investment, all-female founder teams get less than 1 pence.
The picture is starkest for Black female entrepreneurs, they receive 0.02% of the total amount invested.
That’s the playing field.
Women hardly even have a foot on it.
(Maybe a very small toe.)
Now, why does this matter? Isn’t this just an issue for a small group of relatively privileged female entrepreneurs? Like, why should I cry about you not getting funding for your organic turmeric latte startup?
That’s a fair question. Let me put it like this:
You should care because in the end these things end up determining who OWNS SPACE.
Yes, THE INFINITE DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE.
You have probably noticed that there’s a male billionaire space race going on. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has revealed he will launch to space on July 20 on the first human spaceflight for his company Blue Origin. This has then sparked reports that Richard Branson might try to beat Bezos to it and obviously Elon Musk has plans to move to Mars.
The first space race was a competition between The US and the Soviet Union. We pitted capitalism and communism head to head, whoever reached the moon first would have proven their ideology superior. Space Race 2.0 on the other hand is a male missile measuring competition between a handful of billionaires.
(please pause and REFLECT on what this says about our time)
Elon Musk wants to colonise Mars. Jeff Bezos does NOT want to go to Mars (probably because he wants to stay as far away from Elon Musk as possible) instead he wants to move manufacturing into space and haul cargo to the moon. Richard Branson basically just thinks space is cool.
Which is why if I had to vote I’m inclined to vote for Branson.
We tend to think of these men as mad geniuses. Larger than life characters destined for greatness. But they all started with much more mundane things. Okay it wasn’t exactly organic turmeric latte but Bezos sold books, Branson sold records and Musk created a local app.
Now they are colonising space.
Investors often say women’s ideas are “too small”. And fine, go ahead and mock organic turmeric lattes and girlbosses as much as you like. But that nail salon or that new bike seat invention for children could have been the start of other businesses. The sale of them could have generated capital that could have been invested in other ventures. Now they die because 80 percent of female-owned businesses that need capital are thought to be underserved in the global economy.
Who get’s the money today determines what cars we will get to drive, what groundbreaking medical treatments we will receive, and what logic will guide the robots to whom we are yielding increasing power. And that’s capitalism, baby!
Have some cheese.
Happy Thursday!
Katrine