Budge over, boys. The next decade will be women’s, if a recent forecast is to be believed.

“A tenfold increase in the number of female CEOs in FTSE 100 companies!”, “Double the number of female MPs!”, “100% growth in women-owned start-ups!” — these predictions come from the trendspotter Jeremy Baker, of ECSP Europe Business School.

At a recent Avon-commissioned discussion on the rise of “lipstick entrepreneurs” (otherwise known as independent businesswomen), there was breathless talk of female boards and millionaires, of a rise in househusbands and of the end of the pay gap and the glass ceiling. Shiny new names addressed a brand-new vision: “femterprise”, “domestecutives” and, of course, the “lipstick entrepreneur”. According to the Future Laboratory’s accompanying report, we are right at the tipping point of “femterprise”.

And the catalyst for this progress? The “mancession”, obviously (so named because it was men who were bitten hardest). With a nothing-to-lose attitude, women have been rolling up their sleeves and jumping in to bail out the boys. “Women deliver on a call to action,” says the UK president of Avon, Anna Segatti.

The recession necessitated enterprise — the report claims that the past 12 months have seen a significant growth in the number of women starting their own businesses and entering the workforce, often for the first time in their lives. There are now more than 1m self-employed women in the UK, and that figure is set to double in the next decade. In United States, meanwhile, businesses owned by women are growing at twice the rate of all American firms, according to Michael J Silverstein and Kate Sayre in their new book , Women Want More (Collins Business £18.99).

With job security still looking shaky, and childcare still largely the preserve of women, it’s easy to see the appeal of the start-up. This new class of “fempreneur” makes her work fit around her life — by being her own boss, she can choose her own (family-friendly) hours, preferred work/life balance and office location.

And for the “mumpreneur”, there’s no place like home. “Homeworking makes total sense,” says Suze Orman, a personal-finance expert and author of Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny (Spiegel & Grau £15.14). “I don’t have an office and I don’t have employees, but independent contractors. It saves me so much money.”

In the aftermath of what has also been called a man-made recession (blame it on those greedy male bankers), enter the right-brain revolution — one that values the feminine skills of intuition, communication and caring. The Future Laboratory argues that female methods make a lot more sense now: it’s risk awareness over risk-taking, teamwork over power struggles, inclusivity over hierarchy and striving for the common good, not bonus-based greed.

No wonder, then, that the recently launched Women’s Leadership Fund (worth some £124m and backed by Cherie Blair) is investing in firms that have high numbers of women in senior roles. Its research shows that companies with a balance of men and women in senior jobs outperform those with men at the helm. Yet while Norway has met its 40% quota for women in the boardroom, in Britain the figure stands at just 12%. And the current count of female FTSE 100 CEOs? Just four. Some areas clearly remain bastions of male power — but for how much longer?

The femterprise revolution is under way.

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Posted January 4th, 2010 by sherrilynne No Comments » This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 10:04 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.