Associate feature: Enabling the ‘forgotten’ women of Scotland: Potential entrepreneurs for the future

Not enough attention has been paid to improving the life chances and opportunities of vulnerable women. These women often experience multiple deprivations and are most at risk of being left behind because of the combined effects of vulnerabilities, which creates powerful barriers to economic progress and social inclusion. With the Scottish Government’s pre-pathway fund, a successful pilot entrepreneurship programme was delivered to two groups of vulnerable women (those leaving the criminal justice system and survivors of abuse) over an 8-week period in January-March of this year. The aim was to understand whether entrepreneurship can help overcome economic and social barriers for vulnerable women in Scotland and provide an avenue of financial independence for them.  Evidence highlights that entrepreneurship can have positive social spillover effects such as helping reduce crime which would decrease custodial sentences for women and allowing them to break free from their violent familial relationships.

To give some context of vulnerable women in Scotland, over the last 20 years there has been an “unprecedented increase” in the female prison population in Scotland. The reasons for this are “complex and diverse” as highlighted by the Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research. The recent Scottish Government’s report ‘Women’s Justice Leadership Panel: The Case for Gendered and Intersectional Approaches to Justice’ (2023) has failed to consider entrepreneurship for women with convictions. Furthermore, data released by Scotland’s Chief Statistician shows police recorded 61,934 incidents of domestic abuse in 2022-23, with 95% of victims being women. This is a decrease of 4% on the previous year. Despite this decrease, the most recent results from the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey estimate that fewer than one-in-five cases of domestic abuse are reported to the police.  

We found a number of key themes which emerged from the evaluation and research undertaken of the programme: (1) the women realised they were very much community-driven - building groups with each other for support, networking and friendships, (2) they were empowered and they saw their confidence grow by participating in the programme, (3) they learnt not only new skills but re-learned and built on existing skills, (4) the idea of starting their own business became a reality they had never explored previously, and (5) the women were very focussed on ‘communitising wealth’ which involved them passing on skills to their children, grandchildren and community which otherwise might be forgotten or lost. 

Given the findings that emerged, it is recommended that the Scottish Government undertake more work with vulnerable women to understand their needs and how to meet them. Furthermore, work needs to be done with the women to help them understand self-employment and starting up their own business as a potential avenue for financial stability and independence. Thus, we propose that our recommendations can be met by: (1) creating a unit under the Women’s Business Centre which directly addresses the needs of vulnerable women for entrepreneurship; (2) support agencies for vulnerable women to incorporate or promote entrepreneurship alongside their core services; (3) entrepreneurship programmes to be much more grassroots  by embedding them in local communities; (4) appointing enterprise champions specifically for vulnerable women and; (5) long-term evaluation of the programme and the women participating in the programme which includes creating a baseline business skills survey in Scotland to effectively evaluate all training and advice programmes.

These ‘hard to reach women’ should no longer be ‘easy to ignore’ because there is potential to explore and understand the intersection between community engagement and inequality to build effective solutions and create entrepreneurs of the future.

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This article is sponsored by the University of Strathclyde.

www.strath.ac.uk/business/huntercentreforentrepreneurship/