Women, start ups and entrepreneurship

Wonderful Ted talk by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon on women entrepreneurship. Insightful comments on the association between women and micro financing. I was n't particularly looking for this topic but it resonates with me and CreativeDynamix's work with women in business and women's development.
I've pulled these quotes from her talk in case you think you don't have time to watch

"Never import other peoples limitations"

"The women in my family are not exceptions... we are not a special interest group we are the majority... for for too long we have under estimated ourselves and been undervalued by others. It is time for us to aim higher..."

and one we could all benefit from "think bigger"

In relation to Irish women in business and female entrepreneurship in this country I definitely see issues around not thinking big enough, bootstrapping and scalability. Once businesses come within the 100K turnover they struggle with funding, development and the grow or stay small mind trap.

[Do women come to enterprise in a different way then men? 

Our driving influences are they different?]

Although we are no longer a nation of conflict as such Ireland is still a young nation of change. Flux seems to be our natural strife. We have moved from the struggles of depression in the 70's with the help of the EU and raised our heads to look and work beyond the troubles developing a aspiring progressive society in the 90's. So much so that we started to see immigration on to Irish shores a definite reversal + a change to the psyche of the nation happened. The Celtic tiger did not roar everywhere don't forget that. Not all of us escalated our wealth trajectory to the max... but now - where are we now?
It looks and feels a lot like Irish Society has digressed, we may have moved back to economic hardship at the core but I'd argue the poverty is not the same. It has changed you don't see the abject poverty of the 50's -70's. The face of poverty in 2012 is more subversive. Now it creeps into middle class families it moves beyond boundaries of underprivileged and excluded society. There is a new type of poverty that questions the very nature of why we live and work within the Irish tax laws, why we pay charges and our bills.
Some of my work in the last few years has been with women in business groups; business networks and the local county enterprise boards. I noticed that no matter where in the country I stood to speak and engage these women's networks they had similarities. Most of the women were early stage entrepreneurs or business owners passionate about their business yet they were more then a little shy of standing in their own brilliance. They suffered from that odd combination of female embarrassed self awareness and striving to push their business forward. Some of them had little or no business experience their skill set was one learnt through trial and error. There were no strong role models of women in business or female entrepreneurship in their area. In a room full of peers many suffered from the inability to stand up and represent their business. Some it seemed did not know how to help themselves. These are reasons why I continued to speak in public and working through experiential learning to support women in business.
More recently I've been asked to turn that focus to women's groups; to look at how to solve unemployment by helping women to solve it for themselves. Ideas for business is about creative thinking, skills recognition and boosting self esteem. It has at its core the gem of supporting women to change their lives, to value themselves and recognise their contribution to their family, their community. It challenges and supports women through the process of thinking outside the box about how their contribution can support personal change and answer their own questions. Perhaps starting with small ripples we will see a tide of change.