When I was in high school, I participated in a New Zealand entrepreneurship program and started a lip gloss company made from Vaseline and vanilla essence.
Ten years later, I built my first export company and that’s when I started thinking about gender and how it affected me when developing my business in New Zealand, which I’ll tell you in detail at the end.
In 2018, the New Zealand government, through NZTE, an organization that supports exporting companies, decided to do something about exporting women in the export sector and to grow companies globally.
Well, that’s great, but is lifting women up really good business? We’re going to put the answer in numbers.
Only 15% of New Zealand’s manufacturing exporting companies are led by women, but if 50% of companies could be led by women, that would be an 8% increase in New Zealand’s associated GDP of $25 billion.
We know that a lot needs to be done to achieve this goal. Women hold only 22% of male-equivalent leadership roles in publicly traded companies, but that has been declining somewhat over time.
For investments in general, we know that only 2% of venture capital globally goes to women-run companies, meaning women face barriers that men don’t.
Research has it that it takes 267 years for men and women to achieve economic equality globally, and I don’t know what you’re thinking, but that’s a long time, so we want to do something about it.
We truly believe we can get out of the world we left behind.
We know that 15% of export companies in New Zealand are run by women, in Canada the figure is similar, and they’ve been doing it for over 20 years, and in Australia the percentage is slightly higher.
What did we do?
With a long-term goal of having 50% of the companies we work with be led by women, we decided to double the number of women we work with over the next three years.
We’ve established that there are two groups of clients we work with that women-led businesses can export, so how do we encourage the remaining 30% of leading companies to consider going global?
In women-only groups or mixed groups with men, we create groups for women to learn together as their companies go global.
We share this challenge with Mexico and the world, but we are happy to see great progress.
A year ago, Mexico joined the Global Compact on Trade and Gender created by Canada, Chile and New Zealand.
The agreement promotes mutually reinforcing trade and gender policies, and opens up new opportunities to increase women’s participation in trade, within the framework of other efforts to promote gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.
So there’s a lot to do and a lot to celebrate this Women’s Day.
B.S
While traveling in New York, we were checking out at a hotel after a week with our distributors and the hotel manager turned to my male CEO and said, I hope your business is going well sir, and then she said, I hope you enjoyed your shopping in the city, I started my own. A woman who runs an $80 million company.
Anna Gunther, Women’s Export NZTE
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