Pooja Kothari, the founder of Storemore Storage Solutions, took a group of nine other winners of the Women Entrepreneur Quest (or WEQ) of 2016 to Silicon Valley in California.

There, she found that although the situation is generally better for women, woman entrepreneurs tend to face the same problems there as they do in India.

Although these women came from a wide variety of backgrounds, they shared the same opinions about what intrinsic societal factors have caused these obstacles for women in entrepreneurship.

One of the biggest problems that the women addressed was the lack of woman role models and the small proportion of women already in the industry.

Because of this, any woman aspiring to become an entrepreneur must start from scratch, and any successful woman entrepreneur is always seen as a breaker of the male-dominated mold.

It causes a tentative attitude among women as well, which causes them to be less aggressive in their field. Therefore, the effect is cyclical; many do not become as successful as their male competitors, and there ends up being a lack of woman role models for the next generation of aspiring woman entrepreneurs.

This effect is caused by an even bigger issue: the deeply-rooted patriarchal mindset of human society. It applies to all societies around the world, given that the same issues seemed to apply to the Silicon Valley women and the Indian women.

This extreme presence of male entrepreneurs is intimidating for many women, which often causes their tentativeness in their approach to their career. The fact that it even matters whether someone is a man or a woman also presents a problem because for women and men to be truly equal in this field, someone’s gender should not matter to their success.

However, the fact that women are addressing these issues is a step forward in it of itself, since aspiring woman entrepreneurs can now recognize these issues and look up to the women who spoke out about them.

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