Women entrepreneurship: How digital communities can help build a better ecosystem

India today faces three large challenges – employment, equality (gender, social, et al), and the environment. The Internet today is changing the face of employment and equality.

By Sairee Chahal

India today faces three large challenges – employment, equality (gender, social, et al), and the environment. The Internet today is changing the face of employment and equality. Our obsession with job creation is an old narrative. However, the future of work is about building ecosystems, not jobs, because when ecosystems get built, members of the ecosystem turn entrepreneurs to create the jobs.

One of the most successful examples of a sustainable ecosystem is the Sewa network – a group of self-employed women to collectively work towards better pay and benefits. Today, there are over 2 million women in the network. The network effect has brought to their community additional benefits – health, education, skilling, and overall improved quality of life. The Amul growth story also has had a transformative effect on the lives of rural women in Gujarat.

The impact of women-only networks across the world is a growing phenomenon. Women, traditionally, having been excluded from workplaces, social spaces, and business networks, have taken the initiative and started their own. The underlying bro culture of traditional networks has also nudged women towards building their own communities, be it for entrepreneurship and funding, moms, tech and other space.

With India’s massive Internet growth story, the pace of building massive online communities must be accelerated where women can actively engage, validate choices, get recognition and find peer-to-peer support. A 2017 survey revealed that 30% of India’s internet users, that is around 143 million internet users are women and female Internet growth in rural India was 14.11% as opposed to 9.66% in urban areas.

By 2022, the number of Internet users in India is expected to go up to 800 million, with 35-40% of these being women. To boost the numbers, and get more women online, a number of schemes have been announced offering free smartphones to women in lower income segments. The price of data plans has also dropped, and the right to use the Internet has even been declared as a basic human right by the United Nations.

This is just as well because a safer, constructive, high trust, high empathy Internet for women will no doubt, be a game-changer for India. For example, in healthcare, a country struggling with a skewed doctor-patient ratio, access to credible online information and high empathy health communities is a big support for expecting mothers, new mothers, and women in general.

In the entrepreneurship space, I am seeing the rise of cutting-edge communities supporting a cross-section of women entrepreneurs at various stages of their business journeys. However, the real value of such communities lies in recognising the real-life needs of a cross-section of women on the Internet. We have single mothers, students, professionals, entrepreneurs, homemakers, senior women etc., looking to get independent. Currently, entire pockets of women are left out of conversations, and this also makes the Internet less appealing.

As Internet penetration increases, I also see a trend of hyper-local communities, getting right down to the RWAs and existing offline women-led communities. Imagine the 2 million women of the SEWA network coming together in an online community.

Safe online women-only communities encourage complete strangers to support each other via conversations, and connections and by showing up as champions for each other. This is why investment in the women’s internet, high-quality connectivity and deeper value, will show real returns on employment and gender equality for Indian women, in the long-term.

(Sairee Chahal is the founder and CEO of women’s community platform Sheroes. Views are the author’s own.)