Giving Compass' Take:

• Winthrop Carty discusses how social entrepreneurship could benefit from the addition of more gender-balanced approaches to social change.

• How can donors advance gender-balanced funding in social entrepreneurship?

• Read more about 35 entrepreneurs to watch for in 2019. 

Social Entrepreneurship is about using entrepreneurial approaches to change systems of governance, business, and behavior for the betterment of the planet and people. In the often-quoted words of Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, “Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.” Nevertheless, at least in the aggregate, social entrepreneurship seems to be falling short of its promised systemic change. Does gender have anything to do with that shortfall? If so, what would a more gender-balanced approach to social entrepreneurship look like?

Gender imbalance in social entrepreneurship is more than just about parity in numbers of men and women in leadership roles. It’s also the fact that we persist in building our institutional frameworks and constructing our models of leadership along patriarchal lines.

In what ways is social entrepreneurship “patriarchal”? For starters, most funding, awarding, and media attention still favors the lone hero entrepreneur who envisions a change and battles opposing forces to bring it about — maybe a Wonder Woman, but usually a Superman or Batman.

So, what might a more gender-balanced approach to funding, supporting, and practicing social entrepreneurship system look like? I think such approaches would emphasize:

  • Collaborative Entrepreneurship, included sharing the credit for who envisions a change and battles opposing forces to bring it about.
  • Rewarding those social entrepreneurs who emphasize scaling through adaptation or replication (by others).
  • Consultative and less hierarchical approaches through participatory design approaches, such as those pioneered by MIT D-Lab;
  • Longer-term investment and funding approaches modeled on Acumen’s “Patient Capital” and less fixation on short-term ROI.
  • More focus on “emergent” approaches to organizational strategy as opposed to linear logic models based on a singular grand vision.
  • Greater focus on systemic impact and less on “measurable” attribution back to one individual, institution, or funder.

Read the full article about gender and social entrepreneurship by Winthrop Carty at Medium.