She-cession

She-cession

Subject: Government Schemes

Context: Seventy per cent of businesses run by women in India have reported a fall in revenue and one in five claimed its revenues had been completely wiped out, according to a joint report by Bain & Co, Google, and AWE Foundation on small businesses owned by women.

Context:

• A new term “She-cession” is used to express, how badly the Covid pandemic has hit women-owned businesses. The term she-cession to describe the coronavirus-induced recession because, in a rare turn of events, women’s unemployment is higher than men’s unemployment.
• It’s normally the other way around in times of economic downturn. During the Great Recession, the gender differential in job losses was so pronounced that analysts dubbed the crisis a man-cession.
• The man-cession, where 78% of jobs lost were held by men, resulted in the largest gender unemployment gap (as high as 2.5%) since World War II.

Several interventions are on to help women-led businesses regain their mojo.

• Sheroes: A women-only social network, recently launched Shop on Sheroes, a social commerce platform. The biggest challenge in being a small business owner is to scale the business from one’s circle of influence. Over a thousand entrepreneurs have joined the Shop on Sheroes initiative within 6-7 weeks of its launch. Several women entrepreneurs are smartly pivoting to social commerce, using platforms like Instagram to be discoverable — and it is paying of
• Fund Femme: A new database of women and non-binary owned businesses that has been launched by marketing communications agency Wunderman. The global platform allows consumers to discover, and shop from, women and non-binary business owners across beauty, fashion, food, homeware, technology, health and wellness, travel, fitness, arts and culture, media and charities.
• Upskilling sessions: The longer-term plan is to organise mentoring sessions and help upskill entrepreneurs in areas of technology and finance.
• A joint report with the World Bank and OECD on small businesses revealed that by the end of 2020, almost a third of small businesses on Facebook had increased their digital sales compared to before Covid-19 pandemic “It has become easier to get access to a larger audience with social media tools.