Ms Jean O'Sullivan:

As Ms Julie Sinnamon has outlined, we reviewed a number of challenges at the beginning when we were trying to build the strategy. We went out and spoke to many people about what they felt was required to help encourage the number of female entrepreneurs to grow. It is interesting to note that the work we are doing today is not only from an Enterprise Ireland point of view, but involves lots of stakeholders out in the community working together and harnessing our relationships with different corporations and networks. As Senator White said, when one meets a female entrepreneur, one does not necessarily see those key challenges immediately, such as low self-confidence. Where we saw it reflected was that they were not applying to our funds. When we had female specific funds, they were the same funds that we were running throughout the year, which was an open offer for anybody to apply, but they were not applying for them. We had about 87 applications for our first ever female fund and typically for the same fund we were only getting 14 females to apply. That had been going on for a number of years.

The quality of the 87 propositions put forward were on par with our normal call for applications. The first questions were where were those women and why were they not coming forward to a general call and why were they not asking for support. As time went on - this programme is running for about two years - on our financial funds, not only are females benefiting from them, but the more who benefit the more publicity they are getting and then more females are applying to our general call. Where we used to have 14 people applying to our general call, we now have about 40 applying, which is a great increase. The female financial funds were only to create awareness of the fact that funding was available. When we started to speak to potential female entrepreneurs, we realised there was a lack of information to make the decision to build their businesses. Some had domestically focused businesses and had the potential to export but had not looked at the issue before because they may not have known anybody else who was currently exporting and also they did not have the information to hand as to where the supports, particularly financial, might come from to help them.

The second important issue in terms of that changed the percentages seeking investment was that we connected all those females together. Ms Julie Sinnamon mentioned role models and understanding the process of applying for funding and how one has to pool together one's business plans and all the different pillars of support that are required in order to build one's business. The online networking platform allowed females to be connected on the basis of what information they wanted to know from each other. Who are they selling to? What markets are they in? Who has been investing in their companies? What export sales programmes are they going on? Have they gone through an accelerated programme and, if so, have they found it useful?

Awareness and information has been very important to us in terms of what we are trying to do.

The role model aspect has been very important for us as well. Over recent years, we have seen reference to the same role models all of the time. Women in business who are looking at taking the leap from corporate life into starting their own businesses are seeing only a small number of visible entrepreneurs. However, there are numerous very successful female entrepreneurs in Ireland who simply do not have the same visibility. We are, therefore, trying to profile all of the opportunities. Even in the technology sphere, from a promotional point of view, anything one reads is typically about Marissa Mayer or Sheryl Sandberg. However, there are numerous women doing well in the technology field who do not have the same profile. Therefore, women in STEM subjects or STEM programmes think only a minority of women are leading technology businesses, which is not correct.

When looking at the challenges which impact on female entrepreneurs, it is important to realise that not all of the challenges impact on every female entrepreneur. Therefore, we really needed an integrated and focused programme which had actions across a number of key initiatives. One of the things we did with our development programmes was to look at the challenges and then we looked to external providers to run programmes in partnership with us. The NDRC programme, for example, focuses on females in technology. The DCU Ryan Academy programme focuses on women in a main accelerator programme who wanted to be in a female accelerator programme. The Going 4 Growth initiative looks at companies which are not necessarily start-ups but which have a keen interest in exploring the international potential of their business and growing it. This focuses on growth and peer-to-peer mentoring. Cork Institute of Technology is trying to attract those who are currently in corporate life into entrepreneurial experience.