UK needs more female business role models says expert

Mar 28 2008 by Alistair Houghton, Liverpool Daily Post

Enterprise expert says UK needs more female role models to encourage women to start up in business

THE UK needs more female role models to encourage more women to start their own businesses, one of the UK’s leading experts in women’s enterprise told a Liverpool audience yesterday.

Professor Susan Marlow of Leicester Business School, based at the city’s De Montfort University, spoke at an event organised by support agency Train 2000 about Liverpool’s planned International Centre for Women’s Enterprise.

Prof Marlow discussed the challenges women faced when going into business, and said organisations such as Train 2000 played a key role in helping business ideas become reality.

She said: “We need more role models. If you ask people who are female entrepreneurs, most people can identify people like Anita Roddick, for example, or Laura Ashley or Martha Lane Fox.”

She said, however, that these people can seem out of reach, and what was needed were more local role models who have achieved smaller but more attainable success in business. “We need the next generation of entrepreneurs – people who are in school at the moment – thinking, yes, that’s something I can actually do. The importance of groups like Train 2000 is that they can tell people about local successes.”