Ms Nicola Byrne:

We are not short of data about entrepreneurship. Reports are coming from every corner and every angle. Given that members have copies of our presentation, I will speak off script. I am a high profile female entrepreneur. I established 11890 in 2006 and before that I had other small businesses. For example, I did all the advertising on Eircom telephone boxes. During that time I have raised three children, now aged 10, 12 and 16. I have continued to work and now, again, I am stepping into the face of entrepreneurship and feel like a start-up again with our new product.

The challenges for women are completely different from those of men. While I was running those businesses and was pregnant, as the leader of the project it was a minefield trying to take on staff who could hold the fort while I was away, or even believing I could afford staff while I was away. The Government has many policies, such as the latest Momentum scheme which encourages other entrepreneurs to start businesses to take long-term unemployed people and turn them into entrepreneurs. This is where my debate on entrepreneurs begins. Why do we want entrepreneurship? It is a word which embraces much and which many do not understand. Do we want people who cannot find a job to work for themselves? Is it because people have a desire to be innovators and want to work for themselves? The male-female issue does not catch us at the beginning, rather it is the reason we want people to be entrepreneurs.

According to the lip-service, people become entrepreneurs because people believe they can work for themselves and do better. However, for some people, after this recession, there is no choice and entrepreneurship is the only path open to them because no employment matches their skill sets and they need to be retrained and given an opportunity to go back out and work. While the Momentum policy of taking lots of entrepreneurs off the long-term unemployed lists is brilliant in one way, if there is no other funding available to an unemployed person the guaranteed way for him or her keep all benefits is to become long-term unemployed and stay with his or her long-term benefits for two years after having successfully completed the course. This is not an equal treatment of entrepreneurship. A person who leaves a job and sets up a business gets no benefit, reliefs or rewards for the risk. Yet we have policies to take a different section of society, turn them into entrepreneurs and fund them to the tune of €40,000 per year.

I have been on the board of the local enterprise office, and the enterprise boards before that, for a long time. I also sit on corporate boards. We see a large female participation rate on enterprise boards and yet the reality is that we still see 60% to 70% of these businesses set up by men because they are export growth. For the Irish Exporters Association, that is a perfectly valid remit for the enterprise boards. The reality is that women coming into these enterprise boards want to set up lifestyle businesses and not all of them want to export. There are no supports for them on the ground. They set up lifestyle businesses because we have the babies and need nine months out to bring a child into the world and then we need time off afterwards to bond with the child and be with it. The reality of modern family life is that mammy is still the centre of family life. We cannot have mammy the entrepreneur and mammy the full-time carer. It is not realistic because, unless one has an amazing family that is willing to support entrepreneurial adventures, we cannot achieve it. There is no child care that suits the hours I work. I leave for a week to go to the United States because the reality is the business needs and there are 70 jobs at stake. I must find child care that suits the father's lifestyle and my lifestyle in order to make it happen. I get no help and no support. If we want female participation, we will have to address this.

For every job a female creates, she does it as a last resort. The evidence shows the last thing women do is recruit. It is hard enough being responsible for oneself and we force ourselves to recruit thereafter. The supports women need are not necessarily financial but could come in many ways. There is a huge amount of mentoring and there are so many things open to me as an entrepreneur. Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Exporters Association, the British Irish Chamber of Commerce and others offer support and facilities. There is a huge amount of networks available but none of them get to the fundamental point that I need help and support with my children when I am away. It is a reality that is obvious but often we talk around it by pointing out the good crèches. Tax breaks are available to crèches but not to the parents. There are facilities for children to be minded in formal, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. arrangements but in the modern 24 hours a day economy those hours do not suit. I cannot have a crèche closing at 6 p.m because I might not get home until 10 p.m. I need a different environment and I need to be able to employ people in the environment who are formal child care workers and not in the black economy. I want to be able to recognise them and support real jobs rather than taking my family and friends and support an economy that exists elsewhere.

I have suggested looking at the local enterprise offices and committing to export businesses. It would be of great support to be able to widen the net rather than turn away applications from people who want to open hairdressers or lifestyle businesses in their communities. We cannot turn people away when we are the place of last resort. There are no banks and there is nowhere else to go other than family and friends. There is no State support. Other than the Government running a dual system of encouraging the long-term unemployed back, while retaining their benefits, people who walk in and want to genuinely set up have no incentive to do so. A phrase mentioned to me early in my career was that big risks require big rewards. Everyone in the economy, after the boom we have just gone through, assumes an entrepreneur is off making gazillions in Silicon Valley. Technology is only a tiny piece of this. As a woman in tech, I find it frustrating that, although I do not programme, without technology we could not have created the unique product we have. We are the only people in the world to have written software to do things where we are doing it.

I do not have a degree in technology, nor do I need one. There are enough resources in the community for female entrepreneurs to be able to employ the talent they need. What I need as a female in tech is not to be told that I must do an IT degree and mathematics. We need universities and support in technology but not necessarily in coding. We all have CoderDojos and we are trying to encourage young girls. I have two girls and one boy and they are not interested in going into a room of men and coding.

It is not their environment. It is not where they want to be. It is not where I want to be. My skills are people, human resources and sales.

Women's skills do not necessarily reflect the mathematical nature of men's skills, and we should not be trying to create a community of female technology entrepreneurs. I have female friends who code. They are not the majority of my female friends. My female friends are going to the National Digital Research Centre, NDRC, which has a fabulous concept that teams them up with a programmer. All the skills they need are met but they do not have to be the source of those skills. We have to consider that women’s role in technology is not as it has been traditionally seen, that if every girl had a science degree and a technology degree they would all be coders and the world would be brilliant. That would be forcing square pegs into round holes. As soon as we recognise this we can embrace the talents women do have. Every piece of technology needs a sales person. Every piece of code requires somebody to sell it, negotiate it, and recruit the staff. There are many skill-sets around this that we are not harnessing in women. As long as we keep throwing money at coding and trying to force women into technology in a way that suits a traditional model it is time to change that model. It is time to stop trying to compete with Silicon Valley and bring out one woman in every 100 and say there is one woman who can code and do this. There are plenty of ways to work in the technology sector that do not require this skill-set.

I would like to see a broadening of skill-sets in the universities. Start recognising there are many support services that degree courses could be built around. The fashion at the moment seems to be the more mathematics, science and coding courses we can get our hands on, the better. There is no sales degree course, unless there might be one in Dublin City University. There is no direct sales course for women in technology that we could start to harness. These are real ideas that we could implement very simply. Female participation could be increased not by the current narrow definitions but by putting women into technology and into a sector where they can be part of the game but not the game politicians see and have been building policies towards.

My daughter will go for higher level mathematics. She is struggling to sit in that class. We barely got her through junior certificate higher level mathematics. She is staying in that course because we were warned that with 25 extra points even if she gets a D in her honours maths that is far better than an A+ in her pass maths. We are rewarding the wrong policies for these young women. That is the case from education through to employment. We do not recognise that women bring a different set of skills to the game. They are not necessarily the skills on the table before the committee. I have many very successful female entrepreneurs as friends and colleagues. Our problems are unique but not to women. They are unique to each business as we face our challenges on the road ahead. We do take on probably more than we should as females. Our genetic make-up is flawed. Our mothering nature will always mean that we are more likely to drop our job and dash home to our children because that is way we have been built, not because that is the way the world has decided it will be. It is my choice. Yet, policies reward the wrong behaviour, so at junior and leaving certificate levels the points system encourages us into something. Why not give 25 extra points for English? A command of the English language is useful in a sales job. Why did we take mathematics? It is because we are building a world that is trying to create programmers and people who think technically.

When we get out into the business world and employment, as an entrepreneur I compete. I lost a staff member recently to a very big multinational. This staff member was a key part of our organisation but Oracle doubled her salary. As an entrepreneur I cannot afford to compete in that world. Multinationals in this country have a lot tax breaks and I have to compete in that market. I am part of the world they exist in. I am sore that they get lots of tax breaks and rewards for creating employment and I get none. I am penalised with an extra 3% in universal social charge, USC, if I break €100,000 in my salary. I am penalised for no pay as you earn, PAYE. If I fail, I get no tax benefits and there is no social welfare net to catch me. I am sore about that. If I had been an employee and chose to take myself out of employment and put myself into entrepreneurship the best route to market is to remain long-term unemployed so that I can maintain my benefits for a further two years to encourage that entrepreneurship.

At every point it has been designed for me to fail as a female. Politicians have done nothing with consistent policies to take it from one end of the game to the other to encourage me to want to work for myself. Yet, in not doing so, the skills I possess may never reach the market. All the women in the generations before and behind me have been met with policy after policy with no joined-up thinking except for men and it is a different world. It is as if we had two standards with one for the behaviour we are trying to get. It is like trying to get orange juice out of an apple and honestly politicians are failing and failing miserably.

What I am suggesting today - I would be happy to take questions - is that we actually go back to the beginning to the school system and we work from education right through to employment. Members recognise that in the real world, as an entrepreneur, I compete with multinationals. They get all the breaks; I take all the risks. They get all the rewards and I get all the pain. When they fail they lose nothing - they lose faceless money. When I fail, I lose everything. I lose dignity. I lose respect. I lose my confidence. I lose everything. Starting again in this country once one has failed is not the easiest place in the world. So until politicians start to reward my risk as a female and introduce work policies from beginning to end, women will not to participate in that. They will opt to stay an employee in a safe job with a multinational and we will lose all the innovation and job creation that goes along with that.