Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Female Entrepreneurship, Women in Tech Industries, Skills Needs and Balanced Regional Development: (Resumed) Discussion

1:30 pm

Ms Orla Rimmington:

We are not seeing enough women in technology investment. We are primarily seeing consumer and food at the moment. We are saying, as Ms Brady said, that if we could see more women going into STEM at an earlier stage, the number of female tech entrepreneurs would increase. We just are not seeing them, which is why we are not funding them. In the case of three of the five entrepreneurs we have funded, we initiated those funding talks. They are not coming to us. They are not knocking down our doors. We are inundated with queries on funding, but unfortunately the percentage of women is very low. We are a big advocate for female entrepreneurship. Three of the six partners are female. That is why we are here, to bring that message across. We are hopeful for the future, given that such a high percentage of Enterprise Ireland investments this year involve female entrepreneurs. That is very strong. Many of them are at the low stage, with the competitive start fund, but we are hoping that they will, over the next year or so, be ready for series A investment.