Entrepreneurship Policies through a Gender Lens

New Zealand

By Anne de Bruin, Massey University

Kate V. Lewis, Newcastle University

Background

There is no explicit enterprise policy specifically designed to target women entrepreneurs in Aotearoa1 New Zealand. Further, there is also no overall discourse about the need for such policies. Reducing the gender wage and employment gaps and increasing women’s representation in leadership and governance are among policy-focused areas that receive Government commitment and action. The “2018-20 Action Plan” for eliminating the gender pay gap in the Public Service, for example, has been established, and the Government has announced it will ensure that half of all directors on state sector boards and committees are women by 2021. However, there are no corresponding policy measures directly targeted at the different needs or challenges of women entrepreneurs relative to male counterparts.

New Zealand is characterised by a vibrant, progressive, hothouse environment for business creation. The country has a well-developed enterprise education system that not only exposes girls and young women to opportunities for increasing their knowledge base in respect to entrepreneurial behaviour, but enhances their perceptions of the feasibility of self-employment as a viable career path. There is also a well-developed infrastructure of hard support initiatives targeted at the nation’s significant population of SME owners. This broad-based platform has served women’s enterprise well. New Zealand, for example, was the top country for supporting women entrepreneurs according to the inaugural 2017 MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs (MIWE), and retained this position in 2018. In 2019, New Zealand was ranked in second place behind the United States (MasterCard, 2019). The MIWE 2019 report tracks those factors that affect the gender divide in business start-up/ownership, including advancement outcomes, knowledge and financial access and support factors for entrepreneurial behaviour. New Zealand is strong in all of the thematic components, and is the only market to have ranked first in four sub-indicators: financial inclusion for women; gross enrolment rates for women in tertiary education; ease of doing business; and quality of governance. The MIWE (2019) report notes that about 3 in 10 business owners in New Zealand are women (31.8%, ranking 5^th). This ranking is higher than other wealthy innovation-led economies such as Singapore, Denmark, Spain, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Policy issue: Is there a need for a gendered entrepreneurship policy?

New Zealand’s gender-neutral policy approach to enterprise calls into question whether or not a sound universal policy approach to improve the status of women and enable a vibrant enterprise culture gains more traction and satisfies the requirements of a specific country context. An exception, however, to New Zealand’s generic approach is that of wāhine Māori (Māori women) in business who have some access to tailored support.

The Māori Women's Development Inc. (MWDI) was established in 1987 as an Indigenous institution, founded, managed and operated by Māori women. MWDI is geared toward the economic development of Māori Women and their whānau extended family, and as part of this mission provides basic support to nascent entrepreneurs at the planning and early growth stages. Government funding over several years has enabled MWDI activity, and currently, a partnership/sponsorship model maintains sustainability. MWDI extends microfinance as a last resort to women who have been unsuccessful in obtaining loans from mainstream banks, and offers capacity building opportunities to Māori women in business. A recently commissioned report provides insights on businesses owned by 6 500 wāhine Māori aged 20 to 65 in 2017. It shows that 3% of Māori women own their own businesses, with the majority working in the agriculture, forestry and fishing; professional, scientific and technical services and construction2 sectors (Ministry for Women, 2019). The report also comments that, although business is a viable option, “there is limited specialist financial support or incentives available to wāhine Māori who want to establish a business” (Ministry for Women, 2019, p. 9). However, this report provides no new analysis on the gap between Māori women and men in business, although it briefly highlights significant enterprise gender gaps between Māori women and men, and between the Māori and the non-Māori and total country populations (MBIE, 2014).

There are also glaring disparities in women’s entrepreneurial involvement in traditionally male dominated industries, namely STEM and the trade professions. Without intervention, the changes in social norms required for more girls and women to grow their skills and qualifications in these sectors will be slow. Despite growing acceptance of the need for more women in STEM areas, and the focus on this issue, there is anecdotal evidence that a lack of confidence impedes the entry of women into STEM-related industries. Nevertheless, evidence shows that affirmative action and selective targeting speeds up the process of growing the pipeline of women into male-dominated sectors. The building and construction industry is a case in point.

Conclusions and recommendations

New Zealand has experienced a degree of success in building women’s entrepreneurship through a broad-based platform that supports business and innovation with no across-the-board women-targeted support initiatives. This perceived success may, however, be an illusion that is reinforced by limited statistical data analysis of gender gaps in entrepreneurship coupled with the lack of attention given to this issue in policy-oriented documents and media. This is in stark contrast to other economic gender issues, such as the wage gap where there is concerted action to analyse and address the issue. As the OECD report on closing the gender gap emphasised, “[t]he paucity of reliable, up-to-date information makes monitoring trends in female entrepreneurship a daunting task. It is one of the main obstacles to better understanding female entrepreneurs’ challenges and the effect on economic growth” (OECD, 2012, p.274). In New Zealand, the lack of timely availability and accessibility of data poses a significant challenge to understanding the needs of women in business. Improved information will bring into focus the nature and magnitude of the varied dimensions of the gender entrepreneurship gap, sparking discourse and highlighting any necessity for policy targeting. Based on the New Zealand experience, the following policy recommendations are offered.

Recommendations for New Zealand

• Consider the impact of the absence of a coherent gendered entrepreneurship policy agenda, and explore whether there are more advantageous ways of supporting women entrepreneurs beyond developing a dedicated women’s enterprise policy.

• Undertake a fine-grained assessment of the needs of women entrepreneurs including measurement via national-level statistics.

• Address structural barriers to building the talent pipeline toward women’s entrepreneurship, including high-growth entrepreneurship, by encouraging young girls into STEM and tradable activities; building young women’s self-confidence and leadership skills via mentoring programmes; and developing vocational and tertiary entrepreneurship education programmes to support those already in place in primary and secondary schools.

References

BCITO (n.d.), “Women in construction: Diversity is good for business”, https://bcito.org.nz/resources/women-in-construction/.

Davison, I. (2018), “Slow progress in getting New Zealand women into traditionally male fields”, The New Herald, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12122944.

MasterCard (2019), “MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs (MIWE) 2019”, https://newsroom.mastercard.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Mastercard-Index-of-Women-Entrepreneurs-2019.pdf.

Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (2014), “Māori in business: A report on Māori running their own business”, https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/749791de0d/dec-2014-maori-in-business.pdf.

Ministry for Women (2019), Ngā wāhine kaipakihi: He tirohanga, Māori women in business: Insights, https://women.govt.nz/sites/public_files/4218_MFW_Maori%20Women%27s%20Report_final2%20for%20web_0.pdf

MWDI (2018), “MWDI 2016/2017 Annual Report: Building a sustainable platform”, https://mwdi.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MWDI-Annual-Report-2016-2017.pdf.

OECD (2012), Closing the Gender Gap: Act Now, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264179370-en.