International Conference for female entrepreneurs –
Women undertaking business ventures

There are still far fewer female than male entrepreneurs in Europe. There are a number of reasons for this, including the nature of the business, perceived discrimination of women, lack of women’s networks, traditional gender roles or the difficulty of combining labour and family.

It is up to European and national politics to overcome these obstacles step by step to create a female-entrepreneur-friendly environment and the conference made an important contribution to this.

The conference was a forum for an exchange of information, as well as for making contacts and exchanging ideas about projects with a sustainable impact. Together with the Senate Department for Economics, Labour and Women’s Issues, the BGZ elaborated the implementation concept, selected speakers and moderators, set thematic priorities, developed the accompanying programme and organised company visits. In brief, the BGZ took over the entire conference management for the successful event.

The conference included the following topics:

(Labour market) political and economic frameworks, as well as instruments to promote start-ups by women at local, national and European level;
Best practice examples regarding capital and financial instruments as well as the field of consulting, coaching, training and qualification of female founders of new businesses;
Obstacles, barriers, risks associated with business’ founded by women;
Success factors for business formation and business growth.

The European networks created, particularly with the municipalities, are used in other joint projects, for example in cooperation with Poland.

“Many of our national economies still permit themselves an assumed luxury. They permit themselves the luxury of discriminating against half of the population on the labour market (…) which is economically extremely ill-advised. Europe needs its women! And women need Europe. (…) I am very happy that our city partnerships provide a forum where we women can exchange ideas. And I am also confident that a recipe for success for whole Europe can be found in this mode of exchange.”