Entrepreneurs are those who start their own business or startup and work there independently. They take and manage all the risks of their company and enjoy the rewards fully. Day by day entrepreneurship is becoming popular among youth though still there are a lot of people who don’t prefer this as they don’t want to break their comfort zone. Entrepreneurship is becoming very popular in modern days for several reasons like you don’t get exploitation on salary, you aren’t answerable to any higher authority, standard of living can be improved with the success, you put a direct contribution to the economic growth etc. Both males and females around the world are showing their interest to come forward for starting their own startup and become an entrepreneur. But what is the situation of males and females in markets specially in Bangladesh? Let’s see it.
Financial and Investor Problem:
Recently a Bangladeshi commercial got published where a female entrepreneur was trying to get some loan to extend her business. But no one was helping her, rather was taunting or making fun of her being an entrepreneur. They had no trust on her that she could pay the loan or can make profit from her business. So she got very disappointed and then someone from an agency comes to help her and gets her loan passed by their agency. Well, yes this is the real scenario of female entrepreneurs in our country. They face so many problems and financial problem is one of them. Not everyone needs investors for their business but those who need it face many hurdles in getting one. In the market people easily trust a male entrepreneur that he can make the necessary profit or return the loan amount and so they get investors or bank loans easily. This is the first thing a female entrepreneur faces when she tries to start her entrepreneurship.
Male Dominated Industry:
The number of male entrepreneurs or working persons is very high in compare of females. So, precisely the industry has got a domination of males. Whenever a female entrepreneur stands for herself, she finds only a large number of males with a hand countable number of females around her to listen to her thoughts, knowledge or ideas. Sometimes this becomes tough for her to make them understand her ways of thoughts and for this reason sometimes they try to act or think like males so that they can match with them. But this is very disturbing to work when you can’t just be yourself and you have to act like someone else. Sometimes females also feel uncomfortable in between males and can’t express themselves to them. So, afterwards they become uninterested in this field.
Pressure of Family Life:
Naturally from the very beginning in our country the females need to fulfil more responsibilities than males. Specially who have already become a parent have a tons of responsibility towards both their family and to their business. And unfortunately in most of the families the male persons are not that much helpful with the females to raise up children or taking the equal responsibilities of family. So it becomes very difficult for females to balance both their duties of family and business at the same time. They don’t get much time for thinking about new ideas, making strategies and maintain the competition with other companies. Thus they lose their demands on market gradually.
Gender Discrimination:
Like the other sectors in Bangladesh, the entrepreneur sector is also polluted with gender discrimination problem. People having more trust on male entrepreneurs lead them to success when on the other hand females can’t even stand on the competition most of the time due to trust issues. Most of the Bangladeshi clients prefer male leading companies and try to avoid the ones with female leaders. Thus the females become demotivated of their work and quit them.
Lack of Experience:
Sometimes entrepreneurs come from different companies with a great amount of experience. But most of the companies don’t prefer their higher posts having a female employee. So, most of the higher level experiences are on the side of males. When the males implement their experiences in their business, naturally the result is very fruitful and they get the best reward or output. Whereas females with a low experience have to do a lot of struggles and still can’t get the equal success like the males.
So, from research and study we saw that females don’t enjoy as much advantage as males get from the society and market. A lot of regulations like financial crisis, male domination in industries, gender discriminations, pressure from family, lack of experience etc put a big hurdle in front of them on the way to become an entrepreneur and enter into the market. So, in the case of Bangladesh, it can be said undoubtedly that both males and females don’t have equal access to markets.