Bar(safe)lona, the home for entrepreneur women
In the Catalan city, businesswomen are pulling together. The ‘Gendered Landscapes’ association has opened a space dedicated to coworking and training, successfully reconciling feminism and entrepreneurship.
Loneliness. This is the word many female entrepreneurs used when they were asked to describe their experience on starting their own businesses. Dolores Arroyo, founder of the interior design company BCN Feng Shui, was working in the gas industry when she got pregnant. The enterprise she was in did not adapt the work to her condition, making her work double shifts, on weekends and even during nighttime. “I gave everything and there was no hope to prosper and grow”, she confessed during an interview. Without a warning, the enterprise fired her and left her to face unemployment and motherhood at the same time.
But that experience did not take her down. She and a colleague had been working on an interiorist project for a long time. She took the best out of the worst and used her degree in marketing to develop that project into something profitable. It took them three years to develop the brand and started offering free projects to make themselves known. After some time, her colleague did not share her vision of going into business and left the project. She thrived, alone.
Marta León, a chemical engineer who founded her own brand of nutrition and feminine hormonal health, is also familiar with that loneliness. “In the end, it is me who has the last word, so the responsibility of every decision weighs only on me. And that weight you have to carry alone” said while being interviewed. Her motivation to become an entrepreneur was not out of necessity, but purely out of personal ambition. She was working in a very monotonous job at a university in Madrid while she developed her education on hormonal health. The big step was leaving her job, moving to Barcelona and starting her own brand all by herself.
When support from family and friends is not enough
Maria Barranco is a natural entrepreneur. As an idealist, she has had the ambition, the skills and the courage to run small businesses since her youngest years. Her first project, in 1997, focused on giving strategies to improve the technical formation for women in the metal industry. In the Seat enterprise, to give an example, women used to sew seats, but the metal sectors were only for men. And the same happened with other factories in the same industry. “One of the first things I did with the workers in Braun was to convince a woman to lift a wheelbarrow” she laughed.
Following this experience, she continued forming and working as a manager in an enterprise that went bankrupt in 2012. After the financial crisis, she and many others became unemployed. As observant as she was, she recognised exactly what the enterprise did wrong and started her own business in women formation to help the great number of unemployed women reinsert themselves into the market. This, and many entrepreneurships later,she is currently president of the Association of Women Entrepreneurs, ASODAME.
Dolores, Marta and Maria are all businesswomen, but they are also mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. No one would think they are alone, but often, sharing the burden of running your own business with your loved ones is not enough. If only there would be a space where women-runned enterprises could diverge and create synergies between them… Except there is.
“We want to be the best European city for women entrepreneuring”, stated Maria José Blanco Gutiérrez, the Local Group Coordinator in Barcelona for URBACT’s action planning network project Gendered Landscapes.
The key role of the European Union
When URBACT landed in this spot of the Mediterranean coast, they were looking for ways to make the city safer for women. The European Territorial Cooperation programme had traveled around the continent to co-design integrated action plans with local stakeholders to face their own gender-equality challenges.
They stumbled across Barcelona Activa, the local development agency of the municipality, their soon-to-be partner in the project. Women’s entrepreneurship has always been a core topic for the agency since its foundation in 1986. In 2015, another EU funded project called Emma chose Barcelona Activa’s School for Women Entrepreneurs to try some new initiatives. Four years later, it was transformed into what it is now: Lidera, the coaching, mentoring and networking service for professional directives or entrepreneuring women.
With that mindset and European Union finance, Gendered Landscapes created Lidera’s son (or should we say, daughter): Espai Lidera. It is a coworking space, with possibility of reunions and networking exclusively for entities who promote the business career of professional women. It includes two types of spaces: the principal one, made to be used as a coworking room, and the secondary one, its purpose is to be a formation space. Currently, it counts with the participation of 12 different entities. They can use the space flexibly, with a minimum of 15 hours a week for the coworking space and 5 hours per week the one destined to formation.
The entities can use them for free, but in exchange, they must organize two annual activities which allow the entities to work together and initiate something that can be of use in the professional field. Last annual activity happened on april 22, one day before Saint George’s and the national book day. ASODAME, in collaboration with 3 other entities of Espai Lidera, organized a celebration on one of Barcelona Activa’s most attractive spaces: the Cibernarium. They invited thirteen female authors to explain their experience on becoming authors and share wisdom on their respective matters.
Encouraging women to become entrepreneurs
Though, as Cristina Pacheco wished, the actual project manager for collective entrepreneurship projects, they would like to give a “subvention to those entities for their activities and professional services at the service and promotion of the project itself, to not let it stay as a voluntary task”. Even though she admits their space and human resources personnel is limited, their effect on the professional community is undoubtedly effective.
In the end, both the coworking space, best for day-to-day use, and the annual exclusive activities allow the entities to converge and transform them into a lobby. Bringing together those feminist entities from different branches of the professional field, it gives the group intersectionality to demand their shared needs as agents in the occupational politics of the municipality, as they share the same objective: gender equality.
Why are projects like Gendered Landscapes fiddling with entrepreneuring?
The act of entrepreneuring is a challenge by itself. Starting your own business may feel delusional and discouraging. “You have to create something advanced enough for it to be new, but not too much so that no one follows you” exposed the highly experienced Maria Barranco. She also stated it is frustrating, as often the bigger enterprises absorb the new-founded ones and success is never guaranteed.
Even though entrepreneuring is not easy, it still is highly necessary. And why is that? Easy, entrepreneurs generate a flow of innovative ideas. They give the market a freshness of evolution that multinationals cannot access due to their protocolised dynamics, which only limitates their behavior and possibility of innovation.
To thrive in the extremely competitive world that is entrepreneuring, the key is to be confident in yourself and in what you sell. The quest for funding demands persuasive pitches and unwavering determination. And, as Maria Barranco exposed, “historically, women have been unconsciously taught to doubt themselves, to not see themselves as capable, to think they have to do more to get there”. That kind of imposter syndrome described by ASODAME’s president is one of the reasons why projects like these need to be implemented.
Encouraging trend
How has the general outlook for businesswomen evolved?
In Catalonia, according to its Institute of Statistics, in the 2021-2022 school year, 57.77% of graduated students were women. And the numbers were very similar with students who were just applying for higher education, with 55.74% of them being women. The percentage of bussinesswomen who hold a Master’s Degree or a PhD is slightly higher than that of businessmen. And yet, despite this majority in education, men had always held the upper management positions. Or at least, until now.
According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) last report in 2022-2023, in Spain the entrepreneurship rate between men and women has stabilized, thanks to women’s increasing participation. In 2021, these two genders balanced the statistics, and in 2022 the percentage confirmed the phenomenon, increasing the percentage of entrepreneurs to 6% of the population.
Also, enterprises are experimenting an increase on their globalization capacities, including the ones led by women. Unlike former years, they do not show reticence to lead projects oriented to external markets anymore. This represents an increase of that international economic orientation from women’s entrepreneurships.
The report also showed differences between men and women’s types of business. Women tend to have initiatives that cause a direct social and environmental impact, with their services directly affecting the final consumer. While men’s entrepreneurship focuses primarily on technological industries. In that sense, it shows that businesswomen aim for enterprises that can have a direct impact on the world, above the objective to accumulate wealth, which is often the main goal for businessmen.
It would be bold to extrapolate these results and relate them to URBACT’s Gendered Landscapes project, as there is no evidence that a regional project inside a single municipality can affect national statistics. But it is evident that, along with the spontaneous increase of women’s participation on entrepreneurial matters, support services like Lidera and Espai Lidera certainly help to equalize the picture.
Entrepreneurship is a relentless voyage through a sea of challenges, where each wave tests the resolve of the intrepid sailor. From the moment of inception, entrepreneurs grapple with uncertainty, navigating choppy waters of market fluctuations and fierce competition. Limited resources often force them to wear multiple hats, juggling myriad responsibilities with finesse. With Barcelona Activa’s collaboration, Barcelona is now one of the safest cities for professional and entrepreneur women.
This article was produced as part of The Newsroom 27 competition, organised by Slate.fr with the financial support of the European Union. The article reflects the views of the author and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for its content or use.
