Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 10 February 2015
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation
Female Entrepreneurship, Women in Tech Industries, Skills Needs and Balanced Regional Development: (Resumed) ISME, Startup Ireland, Cork Innovates and IDA Ireland
1:30 pm
Mr. Mark Fielding:
If there were some initiatives in that regard, it would certainly be welcome. Again, this is necessary if we are serious about entrepreneurship and about bringing female entrepreneurship up to the level it should be at, and I am talking in terms of 1.9 times the number of men to women at present. If we look at the position of HPSUs, the number is increasing, but slowly. The number of patents registered by females is at 8% across Europe as against 92% for males, so we are missing out. As I said at the beginning, this is a competitiveness issue. If we want to get this country going again, we need the female entrepreneurs just as much as we need the males, and we are not getting that at the moment.