Women worldwide, especially in low-income countries, face many barriers to entrepreneurship, including limited access to capital, harassment, and violence.
It’s easy to assume that online services and opportunities lessen these barriers—that women can freely network, sell, borrow, and skill up to make their ventures a success without the biases they face in the physical world.
Yet research shows that digital platforms in and of themselves don’t create equal playing fields. Taking on a digital marketing gig, for example, requires upfront capital for a laptop, reliable Internet access, professional software, and access to data—capital that is harder for them to get.
The World Bank estimates that the total micro, small, or medium enterprise finance gap for women is $1.7 trillion.
Successes like Bumble Bizz, a networking app that lessens harassment by having women be the first to initiate any male-female connection, and CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Associations, a credit program specifically for women entrepreneurs, might lead us to think that we can make a product work for female entrepreneurs only if we rebuild it entirely to their needs. However, while creating equitable online environments demands research and effort, it doesn’t necessarily require the reinvention of existing products and platforms. Any organization looking to break down barriers for women entrepreneurs online and become more gender inclusive can take steps to do so without fundamentally changing their product.
Toward a More Balanced User Base
Our work at Mesh, a professional social network for young people aged 18-35 in the Kenyan informal economy, offers an example. Since 2021, 160,000 young entrepreneurs have joined the platform, and our user base is growing.
While 85 percent of Kenya’s economy is informal and adds $530 million to the economy each month, its potential is largely ignored. Young entrepreneurs often lack access to credit and have little skill-building support. “Meshers” join the community for free to get information from peers about starting and growing their businesses; to advertise; and to meet customers, mentors, and suppliers.
We also partner with corporates that offer gig work and services for Meshers, such as sales gigs for brands like Unilever, mentorship by Deloitte, or affordable credit from 4G capital.
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In the platform’s early days, the female user base was smaller than the male user base, with about 30 percent women to 70 percent men. A nearly equal proportion of men and women make up the informal economy, so we knew this ratio was off. We also saw that women on the platform were far less vocal. As a result, Mesh gave the impression that it was a male space and, by extension, that the business world is a man’s world.
In 2023, gender inclusion became our team’s top priority, and today—following research, experimentation, and tweaks to our design—our user base is nearly 50-50. Posts and comments by women have almost doubled, and female users are far more active in group activities and network-building on the platform.
Engagement among women is now at 72 percent, from a mere 21 percent. The changes also made the user experience better for men, resulting in better results across the board. And we did all this without significant changes to our product.
Organizations large and small can take steps to make their products and platforms more equitable. Here are six things we did to move the dial.
1. Find out what women value and what is holding them back.
Figuring out how to design for inclusion doesn’t happen in the boardroom. Organizations need to pass the microphone to their existing female user base, as well as to women who aren’t yet using their product.
We ultimately ran 57 one-on-one interviews with a mix of men and women users and non-users, all led by a gender expert. We also ran a two-day focus group discussion with men and women, followed by one with only women.
One of the main insights we uncovered was that women value different aspects of the platform than men. While men generally see sales gigs as an income stream, for example, women see them as a way to save up capital to start their own business.
Our research also clearly showed that safety for women is non-negotiable.
Faced with harassment and safety issues in gigs that require them to be onsite, we found that women highly valued information on gigs they could do entirely online. In addition, while men tended to connect with other young people in business one-to-one, women valued group support.
In response to these findings, we looked for more corporate partners that could provide remote gigs. We also doubled down on creating articles and video content that met the needs of women, such as targeted how-to articles, videos of women sharing their stories about online jobs, and skill-building videos on digital marketing.
We also started a women-only group within the larger network and a mentorship program that matches women who want to be mentors with mentees looking for professional support and guidance.
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