10 reasons why female-led companies work

Where are the female-led companies in business? We’re constantly hearing about boardroom quotas being down and big businesses employing positive discrimination to boost women into positions of power. But in this day and age, isn’t this rather patronising?

Jane Duffus names a few reasons why female-led companies are the future of good business.

(Disclaimer – there’s some tongue-in-cheek gender generalisations going on here.)

1. Women are nicer to each other. I work in the comedy industry, which is a notoriously male domain – but I’ve earmarked a corner of it as female territory. And the women who work with me say that they love doing all-female gigs because the atmosphere is so much more relaxed, the audience is more supportive, and nobody wants anybody to fail.
2. Women are physically strong as well as mentally strong. Be warned, women are strong enough to shatter that pesky glass ceiling. Don’t believe me? Look at Karren Brady, Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton and co.
3. Women are good at communicating. Log on to Twitter, the most immediate of all current communications, and look at the people winning at Twitter – they’re all women. They’re all good communicators.
4. The gender pay gap. The current gender pay gap is equivalent to women working for free from November every year. But you get what you pay for… pay people well and they will work better. That’s basic psychology. Cutting corners on wages is not the place to make savings.
5. Women do their homework. Think about it – women have been undermined and sidelined for centuries. Who are the ones to watch? Not the man in the cheap suit making sexist comments behind your back… but the woman you’ve been misjudging for years.
6. Women are good at empathising. Despite what The Wolf of Wall Street wants you to believe, successful business people don’t need to be ruthless, soulless and cruel.
7. Women are historically underrepresented in almost every field – imagine how much better those fields would be if you had the input of a whole other gender? Wow. It’s so simple.
8. Women see problems differently to men. So don’t cut women out of the equation… work together and come up with a whole range of possible solutions. It gets the job done a lot more effectively.
9. Women are better at organising than men. Think about it: for centuries we’ve been tucked away at home tidying up, writing shopping lists and cataloguing the pantry… organising is second nature to women. That’s why we can multi-task and take a business from being mildly average to amazingly brilliant.
10. Have a gender balanced workplace and you will see less sexism, less intolerance and general better behaviour in the workplace. Why? Because you’re not treating women as an alien ‘other’ species. You’re treating them for what they are – people, aka 53% of the human race.

By Jane Duffus, the founder and executive producer of What The Frock! Comedy, which promotes talented female comedians in the UK.