Necessity, mother of invention!
Success has a thousand fathers, they say. In the case of the Cambridge Network, it also has over 3,500 mothers.
It is hard to be precise with e-mail registrations, because only around 6,000 of the 16,700+ people who have registered their e-mails have given us their proper name, company and address. From the e-mail domains, we can see that only about 40% of the total are definitely in Europe - it is a long process working through 4,000+ .COM, .ORG and .NET domains to work out where their operations are based. And obviously the 5,700+ who gave @YAHOO or other e-mail provider e-mails cannot be located. From the names on the e-mail, we can see that over 3,500 are female and over 7,800 are male - and around 5,400 are hard to work out. Job titles like CEO, or role descriptions like "stalker" or "social-misfit" (I kid you not) are hard to assign a sex, and we have an amazing range of developing world names that I simply do not recognise. In fact, only around 9,200 of the names are clearly Anglo-Celtic - 4,600+ are from Continental Europe, Africa or Asia - and 2,900 are of the role description type. So the most I can say is that there are at least 3,500 potential mothers of our Network's success, and there could be up to 8,900.
Why have roughly 2 times as many men as women registered to find out more about Cambridge? 7 of our 9 staff are women, including our Chief Financial Officer. It can't be because of the forbiddingly male atmosphere of our our office - only 30% of these e-mail users are even identifiably in the UK to experience a visit to our office! Perhaps the imbalance lies in the original founder group, which was largely male. But clearly we need to address this. I felt glad that my President is a woman at dinner last week, when I had to present on the quality of life here to a mixed group of European heads of R&D for leading companies, half of which were women. Too many of the mostly male, white and middle-class entrepreneurial cases we could cite to illustrate the power of our region showed anything but openness and meritocracy. We are lucky that the University has promoted a talented woman to a leadership position and she has chosen to lead our Board among her many other concerns.
But perhaps we are being too hard on ourselves. Cambridge Network is a rather more diverse group than the top ranks of either the local Universities or the business community. A very brief review of just 4 of our larger University members (Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge, East Anglia, London Business School) shows 4 male Chancellors/Deans (Michael Ashcroft, Prince Philip, Sir Brandon Gough, Sir Andrew Liekerman) and 2 male and 1 female Vice-Chancellors (Michael Thorne, Alison Richard, Bill MacMillan), with ratios of male to female staying fairly constant through the Deputy/Pro Vice Chancellor ranks. I attended a dinner last night in the wonderful all-women college of Murray Edwards, recently re-founded with a £30M gift from Ros Smith (a graduate of the college) and her husband Steve Edwards, a couple who built up a very successful software business. The business angels group who I met were the very best and brightest local serial entrepreneurs, who naturally wish to remain anonymous in case people bother them. The session was quite daunting, a gauntlet of criticism to some businesses seeking angel investment of £100K-£300K, with leading angels actually raising money by show of hands at the end of the dinner discussion. All of these entrepreneurs achieved their wealth through merit, serially founding and selling on very successful businesses that provide employment to many people today. Of the entire group of around 20, there were only 2 women. I asked the one who managed to attend the session why there were not more women there. She said that it was a reflection of the impact of childcare on women's ability to dedicate sufficient time to work at a critical period in their career. She also pointed out that in the entire region, there was only ONE independent woman entrepreneur who operated at this level, modestly grouping herself and Ros Smith as examples of partners in a successful wife and husband team. Perhaps the angel community in London has more women, but probably not a 50:50 ratio. So this seems to be the case across the whole of the Greater South East.
Fortunately, things can change very fast. People found new businesses all the time, and women are good at doing that. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor conducted by our new member London Business School shows most female participation in entrepreneurship in countries like Brazil (14%), the US, Canada, Italy and Australia (5-7%). In all countries, female participation lags behind male, with the smallest disparities in countries like Italy, Canada and Spain and the greatest in Korea, the US, Norway and Australia. From qualitative discussion with participants they determined that the reason so many smart Italian and Brazilian ladies start their own businesses is precisely the lack of well-paid and secure work in larger companies. Necessity was the mother of those inventions.
So I would love to see thousands more women join the Network and succeed in growing their own businesses here the Greater South East of England. We have a brilliant Open Event coming up on 6th May where two very successful companies (Ubisense and Abcam) lay out how they founded successfuly in a recession. While others who require external finance hang back, now is the hour. Let's make sure that hour finds the woman, as well as the man!
PS I had the following interesting comment from a successful local woman who has founded and sold on a business:
"I scanned with interest your latest blog on Mothers of invention – it’s a pet topic of mine, particularly as I’ve had to bail out of attending countless fascinating Camb Network meetings due to early evening being a childcare nightmare; both when I was working full-time and currently as a freelance, events at around 6.00 for any working mum are tough when children are of a certain age, stage and temperament. ... of all the many millions of opportunities in Cambridge, it’s the Cambridge Network events that appeal most to me – personally I’m not so keen on women-only type networking events as the content tends to be less hard-edged, etc. ... As for the Cambridge boys club, yes, it used to feel a lot like that, but think it’s changing and would hope a younger generation of women are not so fazed by a roomful of blokes."
