Empowering Women in Entrepreneurship + Social Enterprise

Executive Summary

The benefits of having more women-led high-growth companies in Canada and in Ontario are substantial, and yet so are the hurdles women must jump over for their businesses to succeed at scaling.

As one means to help overcome these hurdles, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship launched an initiative in September 2017 to develop a Call for Proposals for targeted opportunities to provide better support to women entrepreneurs in the province. The Call will be funded by the Government of Ontario.

In leading the design of the Call, the Brookfield Institute applied the following principles:

• Use an evidence-based methodology to identify challenges.
• Listen directly to women entrepreneurs to better understand their reality.
• Target only issues or interventions that can be reasonably impacted within the scope of funding.

Led by these principles, the Brookfield Institute conducted a literature review, which led to the development of a discussion paper that outlines the overarching challenges women entrepreneurs face.

This discussion paper served as a framework for discussion at an Empowering Women in Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise Design Workshop at the Brookfield Institute offices in Toronto on September 28, 2017 (see Appendix for the Workshop Agenda).