How do Female Entrepreneurs Stand Out in the Pack?

She took it upon herself to learn how to design a website and launch it.

As the process went on, Payne began to really enjoy some of the online courses and was even gliding right through them. Although, she readily admits of getting frustrated when she would get stuck on certain sections, not knowing what her next step should be. During a trip to Los Angeles for work, by pure chance Heather happened to come across a workshop for women who wanted to learn Python (a programming language). Heather fell in love with the assistance that she received and all the support that she had access to. She enjoyed it so much, that upon her return to Toronto, she tweeted out that she was interested in starting a similar workshop like the one she experienced in L.A.

The amount of positive feedback was overwhelming, and within a few months, she and a group of colleagues had their first code-learning workshop. As the saying goes, the rest is history after that. Today she runs two non-profit organizations known as “Ladies Learning Code” and “Girls Learning Code”. In addition, she launched HackerYou, which is open for everyone to attended, and the programs go into much more detail. The workshop is unlike any other coding program due to the genuine care and attention that all the students receive. It is a very positive learning atmosphere, where everyone feels comfortable to ask for as much assistance as possible. HackerYou is there to make sure you succeed at every turning point.

Heather was able to shine not only by creating a workshop that was not available in Toronto (Ladies Learning Code), but in addition she took it a step further by creating HackerYou and launched a concept that related the entire population. Having told Heather’s story, our hope is that you begin to understand type of environment that would make a female entrepreneur really stand out from the crowd.

4. Step out of your comfort zone and take risks.

GEM’s study found very interesting data with regards to female’s perceptions of entrepreneurship, and the fear of failing as an entrepreneur. The first measure (perceptions of entrepreneurship) “assesses whether people believe they have the capabilities for starting a business. This can reflect not only their prior experience or training, but also confidence in their abilities,” (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor). The second measure on the other hand, (fear of failing as an entrepreneur) “assessed for those people seeing opportunities for starting businesses in their area. It is an indicator of whether those perceiving entrepreneurial opportunities would be deterred from starting because of the fear of failure,” (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor). In other words, it assessed whether females would or would not attempt to start a business, based on their fear of failing.

These findings are the exact reason of why Arbitrage decided to include this tip on our list. For the first measure, the results show that across all nine regions in the study, females had a lower percentage than men in believing that they had the capabilities to start a business. When it came to the second measurement, all females across the nine regions in the study had a higher percentage of fearing failure in comparison to men.

We are definitely aware that the state of the economy in each region, along with many other factors can definitely have an impact on women’s fears and perceptions. However, that does not take away from the fact that in all nine regions, women’s fear of failure surpassed men’s fear. Whatever the reason is, all we suggest is that you try to put that fear of failure aside and take a risk to become an entrepreneur!