During the first MEDA Women Entrepreneurs Forum, organized by the Association of Mediterranean Businesswomen, in collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona and the Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of the Mediterranean and attended by more than 200 women entrepreneurs from different business sectors of several Mediterranean countries, participants had the great opportunity to exchange experiences and best practices and to do networking.
In this sense, the Forum has been an excellent platform for dialogue and debate that has made it possible to formulate very interesting conclusions and useful recommendations which we will briefly present as follows.
Representatives from all the Mediterranean countries agreed that, considering that 51% of the Mediterranean people are women, it is important to remember that 0,9 % of the worldwide wealth is held by women, that they provide 50% of the business talent, they achieve higher qualifications than men in universities and that they are mostly responsible for world consumption. But in spite of the strength of this data and the fact that talent has no gender, participants confirmed that in the case of small companies, micro companies and self employed, at present times, men and women unfortunately are not equal and that the business models are still masculine ones. It was furthermore agreed that in business terms women have less capital to invest in starting up their businesses, that they find it harder to promote themselves professionally, that they have a low participation in the IT sector, in Universities and in the labour market and, finally, that for them mobility is a professional obstacle.
Regarding southern Mediterranean countries attendants agreed that they urgently need laws to support a higher participation of women in the labour market and in relation to French speaking Mediterranean countries where English is spoken very little participating businesswomen observed that there is a high level of technological illiteracy. Other remarks done by the attendants have been that there is opposition from family and social networks to women setting up in business us it is considered to cause instability in the family and that the long working days and the law salaries discourage women from participating in the working economy. From a general point of view it has been shown that specially in Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Syria gender stereotypes are one of the main factors preventing women from achieving decision making positions in business.
Finally, participating entrepreneur women formulated several recommendations for increasing the role of women in business, as for example to introduce a gender perspective in top business schools, to generally promote female entrepreneur role models through social recognition and to strengthen the participation of female entrepreneurs in business networks, to provide more flexible working hours, as long as this does not hinder business profitability, to introduce English language in primary and secondary schools, to create local government training programs for female entrepreneurs, to better integrate women in companies avoiding to lose female business talent and, most important, to install equal opportunity values in all areas of education.
For more information about the conclusions of the First MEDA Women Entrepreneur Forum, please click here
