We must all do more to challenge the barriers holding back women

Monday was International Women’s Day and the theme was ‘choose to challenge.’

The event saw the launch of a number of ‘missions’ one of which was: “To celebrate digital advancement and champion the women forging innovation through technology”.

It’s a mission shared by us at Future Care Capital. And we’ve been celebrating the success of one of our own female trailblazers in the shape of our trustee Lise Pape, founder and CEO of the mobility technology company Walk With Path.

This week Lise was among 40 of the UK’s leading women innovators to receive government recognition and cash for their business ideas.

Lise is somebody who has broken down barriers to achieve great things in terms of entrepreneurial work across health and care.

She is a living example of someone who has shown single-minded determination to succeed in spite of the challenges she has faced.

We should all be celebrating women like Lise but we should also be striving to find ways of supporting all women who are facing barriers. Because with support so many more women could succeed and go on to do great things.

We must find a way to create the conditions that nurture female entrepreneurs. Because if we don’t we are wasting much-needed talent.

This was highlighted in the Future Care Capital report published this week Enterprise in Health.

Our research found a significant underrepresentation of women in enterprise activities among both clinicians and academics.

Lack of female innovators in health

Our report points out that a lack of female innovators in health has a knock-on effect in terms of gender bias in treatments and technologies. This then can result in poorer outcomes for female patients.

In parallel to all this the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the inequalities existing around women in the workplace.

With many employees continuing to work from home at this time, our homes and our lives outside of work are increasingly visible to colleagues in some form or another.  

This has shone a new light on the extent to which women take on caring responsibilities outside of work in comparison to men.  I hope this has led to increased understanding of the lack of balance for many women who are trying to juggle their work around these caring responsibilities.

But that’s just one piece of the jigsaw when it comes to seeing the big picture of what it is that’s holding women back. It’s complicated, but we can all play a part in trying to address the issue. And I guess a good starting point is: let’s choose to challenge. It’s only by us challenging that we can instigate real change.