CEO or employee: a female dilemma
Image Source, Junior REIS (Unsplash)
Every day more and more people dream about launching the next Google. Entrepreneurship is on the rise. However, this statement isn't necessarily true for female entrepreneurs. After all, with fewer women in the field, they face the dilemma of choosing between being the CEO or employee in a misogynistic world.
Society still treats men and women unequally, and it starts in infancy. The simple tradition of decorating baby bedrooms with colours based on birth sex is enough to determine society’s view on male and female roles. Pink, for example, symbolises powerlessness. It directs girls to be delicate, soft, and timid. While blue, on the other hand, tells boys they should be strong, harsh, and bold.
However, this blue-and-pink concept is centuries old. In prehistory, the female sex took care of children and made meals. Those activities, though nowadays are not considered soft or easy, were given to them because, theoretically, women were not strong enough to explore new lands or hunt animals like the opposite sex would do. Because of that, they took care of softer activities that did not demand much effort or physical strength to protect themselves from wild animals.
The idea served as the basis for the misogynistic thoughts of the contemporary era, where girls were raised for domestic service while boys were raised to do the heavy work. So, from an entrepreneurial perspective, society prepares men to be CEOs, the ones in charge. They are more likely to be taught to take the lead and less likely to be afraid of challenges. Women learn to be employees and subordinates of their male CEOs and bosses.
Therefore, this world has created several obstacles for female entrepreneurs, the first one being the emotional damage developed by societal pressure. Girls suffer demands from a young age to be perfect in every single area of life (whether physical, personal, professional, familiar or romantic) which is harmful, especially because not everyone fits into an idealised stereotype. Those requirements lead young women and girls to develop problems such as low self-esteem and self-confidence since they tend to compare themselves to others.
Entrepreneurship is a male-dominated field meaning cases of misogyny are numerous. The social structure manipulates the system for men to get most of the benefits, creating additional challenges for women. Some examples are bureaucracies which are difficult for women and facilitated for men, low assessment to funding, lack of entrepreneurial education, historical men dependency, etc.
The reason for the male predominance in this field is understandable since many girls give up on their dreams due to the number of internal and outside challenges they have to face to build a stable career.
Women have to fight against the system to persist in their entrepreneurial careers, and this female dilemma will continue to be a thing as long as misogyny exists. Eliminating it is as hard as raising the percentage of entrepreneur women's representation in the contemporary era.
by Beatriz Azevedo
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