Fannie:Well, Spiffy, did you realize that our online world is gender-biased? For example, only 18% of biographies on Wikipedia are about women, despite thousands of women meeting Wikipedia’s notability standards. In digital news platforms, only one-in-three-mentions of a person is a woman, in part because the search algorithms used by journalists to find sources to interview overrepresent men. Over the long-term, this gender gap in online representation shapes our beliefs of what women can accomplish by amplifying society’s gender biases.
Vilma:Sí, Spiffy! Did you know that Guatemala has the worst gender equity gap in the Americas? Less than 20% of indigenous girls will graduate from secondary school, and fewer than 1% continue to university. The severely substandard Guatemalan educational system compounds this problem. Even when families can and do invest in the promise of education, the school system is failing them. Predictable cycles of early and frequent pregnancy create shackles of intergenerational poverty and exclusion that have kept this talent on the sidelines for centuries. Indigenous women and girls such as myself suffer four forms of discrimination in Guatemala: we are poor, we are women, we are indigenous, and we are from rural villages.
Renu:Thanks so much for having me, Spiffy. Well, according to the 2020 World Economic Forum report, India stands at 149 of the 153 countries surveyed in the economic participation and opportunities for women. At STEP we are trying to build a gender equitable world where all women entrepreneurs are empowered. Our purpose is to create a supportive environment for women-led early stage (social) startups to help them survive the initial phase which is the most difficult part of one's entrepreneurial journey. Our mission is to support 1,000 such enterprises over the next ten years.
