Ambitious female entrepreneurs fostered at Google Campus for Moms,
Israel’s female entrepreneurs struggle with sexism and family pressures as they found businesses
JERUSALEM — Women cradle newborn babies in their arms and dangle soft toys in front of older infants on colourful mattresses, all in a room in a Tel Aviv highrise strewn with strollers and oversized bean bags.
It’s not a play facility. It’s the location of Google Inc.’s first babyfriendly school for startups. Called Campus for Moms, the program involves a series of nine weekly classes designed to give women on maternity leave a boost toward opening their own ventures in a country whose economy is dependent on innovation.
“The course helped me realize that this is who I am,” said Nira Sheleg, a 37-year-old mother of two who founded Wizer.me, a teacher-resource company, during the program.
“I am an entrepreneur, not just a mom with an idea. Now I have a support group, and the mothers around me are amazing.”
Since graduation last July, she’s recruited a chief executive officer and several advisers and plans to start sales soon. Her targeted market: the United States.
The classes — two series have run so far — are designed to address a dearth of women entrepreneurs in Israel, where technology makes up almost half of industrial exports. That contributes about one-third of economic growth, making staffing such companies a priority for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet only nine per cent of technology startups around Tel Aviv are headed by women — about the same as in Silicon Valley.
“The biggest miss we have on talent in the technology industry is the lack of women entrepreneurs and engineers,” said Google Israel’s head of research and development, Yossi Matias, the senior company executive working with the Campus for Moms project. Google is following up with similar programs in London and in Krakow, Poland, he said.
Employees of technology companies in Israel make up less than 10 per cent of the total workforce, according to figures from 2011 posted on the Central Bureau of Statistics website. About seven per cent of all working women are employed in technology, compared with 12 per cent for men.
As little as four per cent of global venture capital flows into female-initiated startups, according to Eva Ventures, a micro-venture capital fund dedicated to the promotion of women entrepreneurship.
Eva Ventures started raising funds a few months ago and hopes to close with about $30 million in a few months before seeking candidates to invest in, said Michal Michaeli, founder and managing partner of the fund. All three managing partners are women.
Orna Berry has lived in the skewed world of Israel’s technology industry for more than 25 years.
“It was always clear to me that this was a man’s society,” said Berry, former chief scientist for the Israeli government and venture partner
“The biggest miss we have on talent in the technology industry is the lack of women entrepreneurs and engineers.”
YOSSI MATIAS
at Gemini Israel fund. She is now a corporate vice-president at EMC Corp., the world’s biggest maker of storage computers.
Along the way, she’s reached out to women in the industry. She calls it less an act of mentoring and more the “virtue of the fact that a woman leader was with them so they allowed themselves not to stop at red lights.”
Sheleg, who abandoned the first business she started due to the demands of her family life, attests to that. She was able to create Wizer. me in the nurturing environment of Campus for Moms, where conversations ranged from baby-sleeping issues to where to register a business.
At Campus for Moms, lecturers speak once a week about technology, give how-to lessons on forming a business and share life experiences. Leaders in the industry explain how to win investors and how to develop a market.
Women startup aspirations in Israel can be undermined by the lack of child care outside the family in a country where school and daycare can end in early afternoon.
Hilla Brenner, founder of Yazamiyot, a women’s entrepreneurial group that worked with Google to create Campus for Moms, says the country’s mandatory military service of two years for women and three years for men is also partly to blame for muting female business dreams. Women often have to accommodate their husbands’ armed-forces duties or delay careers because of their own.
“To become an entrepreneur you need to be completely involved in something else besides your family,” said Brenner, a 38-year-old mother of three who raised money for her first venture when she was eight months pregnant with her first child. “This is more difficult in Israel than in other places because your partner does reserve duty.”
Shelly Hod Moyal, co-founder of equity crowdfunding platform iAngels, which launched this month, says mandatory service also means studies are delayed. Careerbuilding begins when women are as old as 28 and thinking about starting a family.
When they do decide to go ahead, there are prejudices to overcome.
“There was one lead angel investor who said ‘just because you have a pretty smile doesn’t mean you will be successful,’ and another told us we were missing male energy,” she said. “On the other hand, there were a lot of people who empowered us and said, ‘Just seeing two women doing this is refreshing.’”