“So often we want to play the hand we wish we had instead of the hand we are dealt.” Emmanuel Acho, a former professional football player, shared this reflection during a podcast with the brave and inspiring Brené Brown.
His point was not about accepting unjust systems, but a rejection of the idea that African American entrepreneurs should play or be forced to perform according to someone else’s rulebook.
Similarly, for women entrepreneurs, the issue has never been a lack of ambition or competence, but that they are evaluated using metrics calibrated for someone else. They are told to be more confident, more aggressive, show conviction the way investors have been trained to recognise it and contort their businesses to fit financial products that ignore how they operate.
These metrics and the system it serves have been designed to reward and validate those for whom the system was originally built, and when women are evaluated against these standards, their inherent strengths, identity, resilience and lived realities are misread as weaknesses.
Far from being a disadvantage, however, evidence has consistently shown that women led businesses are socially impactful and often demonstrate higher revenue growth. The hand they are dealt is then not the burden, the problem lies in a system whose rules are treated as universal despite having been designed for a narrower range of players.
A game whose rules haven’t changed
Women have traditionally been positioned as subservient to men, as nurturers, child bearers and simply as executors of the will of those who have power. Their role has been to work within the confines of a game whose rules they did not write. While we may wish to tell ourselves that the game and times have changed, the data tells a different story.
The recent African Private Capital Association (AVCA) report on Gender Diversity in African Capital provides a clear view of this reality, examining two critical dimensions of gender representation: who leads funds, and who is represented in their portfolios.
- Gender representation in private capital in Africa is relatively strong across governance (32%), leadership (33%) and execution (38%) roles, However, this representation declines significantly as the fund size increases. Funds of five or fewer team members report 50% female representation on investment teams, while those managing upwards of $1 billion report just 29%.
- Critically, this diversity does not translate into capital allocation. Despite some progress of representation, women remain significantly underrepresented within portfolio leadership, with only 7% of companies being women-founded, and just 12% led by female CEOs.
So, why do we not invest in women entrepreneurs?
This is the big question we should be asking. For a long time, we have spoken about barriers to access to finance for women, but I wonder if we ever ask, who places these barriers? Why do they exist in the capital structure? And most importantly, who is bold and willing to take the step to remove these barriers?
As you contemplate this, pause for a moment and reflect on your own lived experience. Which barriers have been placed in front of you, and by whom?
We project a sense of power towards those who speak with authority, but rarely ask how they got that authority in the first place. What if the confidence we demand is simply familiarity with a system never meant for others?
So when we claim that women entrepreneurs are not confident, what we’re often saying is that in order for them to access power and capital, they must find a way to enter the rooms whose doors have never been open to them, and speak with an authority and loudness that is not authentic to them.
Instead of listening to what they have to offer and what they are building, we listen to how they present. And we decide that because they do not present the masculine confidence we enjoy listening to, they can only access capital if we assign risk metrics to them.
And so the cycle begins. Bigger allocators want to see more women in their portfolios, but instead of pushing for change within product design and innovations on the funds they deliver the capital to, they create de-risking instruments.
And when you speak to women entrepreneurs, the outcome is the same and they still don’t access capital. The barriers (collateral requirements, biased risk models, exclusionary processes etc.) remain firmly in place because no one is willing to remove them. And we go on and on, we write more reports, create new coalitions, and women are still significantly under represented.
There is a way out. It requires the kind of courage that Emmanuel illustrated while telling the story of Ruby Bridges on the same podcast. Ruby was the first African American child to attend a formerly all-white school in Louisiana. Six years old, walking past crowds screaming at her and with parents pulling their children out of school, she took a bold step and walked into a room that had never been opened to someone who looked like her. In doing so, she changed what was possible for everyone who came after, and Barack Obama would later reference her courage as part of what made his own presidency possible.
Who is willing to be the Ruby Bridges of capital allocation?
Who is willing to take a step through a door that the system is designed to keep closed, knowing that only by walking through can it be held open for others.
This is our work at M-Kyala Ventures. Our bold step is to attack the problem from both sides: working with funds, accelerators and other institutions to redesign their processes from within, while deploying growth-stage capital specifically tailored to how women-led businesses operate.
The hand women have been dealt is therefore not a constraint to be overcome, what must change are the rules of the game that refuse to recognise it. This is the task before us, and if you, too, want to remove the barriers, start by understanding that women playing the game have been penalised by virtue of their anatomy, and not by a lack of capacity or ingenuity to thrive as entrepreneurs.
Be the change.