Inventing systems that work for women and girls

The beginning of December I read this Fortune article, Female founders under fire: Are women in the startup world being unfairly targeted?
It contained this shocking statistic and graph below. This is not new information to me, I already knew that this was the messed up state of affairs.

JUST 2.6% of total VC dollars are going to female founding teams.

Chart shows U.S. VC deal flow by founders' gender

I’d been thinking about an alternative model for a while but more actively during COVID. I have been supporting, networking, consulting and mentoring early stage female founders and women business owners since 2007. In 2012 I was blogging about Women, start ups and entrepreneurship. In 2013 I designed an initiative to get women who were at home to explore if they were entrepreneurial beyond making jam and cakes. The program did not go ahead because the commissioning organisation did no grassroots engagement or development. So watching a global conversation on the lack of support for female founders I think how can we solve that?

What if we create a new system and make the current VC model redundant. After all if it funds 97.4% of men’s startups and only 2.6% of women’s startups then it just does n’t work for us lets replace it. Its extractive capitalism.

Its something I think about – what would a system that works for women and girls look like?

So…

Lets design a system that is

for women and girls
regenerative
based in the commons
for female entrepreneurs
transparency and openness as values, open source
ideas are valued, harnessed, tracked, traceable, even failed ideas have value
knowledge, education and training are core central tenants
raises women and girls out of poverty and helps them build wealth
addresses next generation entrepreneurs no matter what age they are
supports women and girls in work acknowledging our lives, how we live them in all aspects including invisible and caring work, pro-bono and livelihood (from DisCo)
harnesses technology for distributed money DTL and Holochain

A Distributed Cooperative Organisation based on a different value chain where money is just one mechanism where we use a eco-feminist-soc-economic model based in the values we want to live and create a future worth living into.

This is a giant ambition.
A global challenge.

Do you know anyone working on it?
or something similar?
Please share links and connect me to their work, introduce me.

What have I missed? What would you add? How might you begin?

Roisin Markham