Transcript: Dealing with adversity, with guest Bidisha Pandey

Onya

Hello, Onya Idoko here. Welcome to our new podcast, Life of PIE. P I.E., Prosperity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Life of PIE is an original podcast from UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity and features research via our MSc in prosperity, innovation and entrepreneurship students. Our mission is to start a different kind of conversation with researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policymakers doing cutting edge work rethinking entrepreneurship and innovation to achieve structural and systemic transformations that lead to prosperity.

Manolo

For this first episode, Doctor Onya and Bidisha will delve into how did the enterprises, led by women survive the COVID-19. The economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic has been devastating, a report by the United Nations states that women suffered the most in the situation due to loss of jobs, limited education access, increased care requirements at home and domestic violence. What impact did COVID-19 had on women entrepreneurs ?13.6% of entrepreneurs In India are women and 20.37 of micro, small and medium enterprises are owned by women, this segment was the worst hit during the pandemic. which factors enabled resilience in women entrepreneurs whose organisations survived the pandemic.? And what can be done to enhance resilience in women entrepreneurs in a VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world? Are women more resilient than men as entrepreneurs? Why or why not? Is resilience determined only by internal motivations and personalities, or is it determined by external factors influenced by society and environment?

Onya

In today's episode, I'm joined by a special guest, Bidisha Pandey. Bidisha is going to talk to us about a study, a really cool study that she did on female entrepreneurs faced with adversity. These entrepreneurs are based within India and Bidisha is going to talk us through some of the cool findings that she discovered. Welcome Bidisha, I'm super excited that we get to talk about this topic today. Please tell us about yourself. Give us a short summary of your background.

Bidisha

Hello Onya. I'm really excited to be here on the first episode of Life of PIE and discuss about my experiences and my learnings from the dissertation and my motivation to take up the topic for the dissertation. So I come from a military background, I served in the Indian Navy for a decade and I was a procurement and supply chain specialist there. After my tenure in the Navy, I applied for the Commonwealth Scholarship and I applied for the P.I,E course, the prosperity, innovation and entrepreneurship course, which I believe is one of the best decisions of my life because the course really helped me gain new insights into the field of prosperity, business development. I think it was a very healthy mix of business and social science, which was very interesting to me. After my course at UCL, I am currently working with the Australian Trade and Investment Commission and this is an Australian government agency and we drive bilateral relationships between India and Australia and any other business collaborations between the two nations. My organisation also stands for partnering for Prosperity, so I'm still in line with the prosperity phenomenon.

Onya

Thank you for the great introduction Bidisha. Let's  delve into our conversation about this really cool study that you did on female entrepreneurs and resilience during COVID-19. What was your research question basically and why is it important?

Bidisha

So my research was essentially focused on women social entrepreneurs in India. Entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that involves a lot of risk taking. There is a lot of risk and uncertainty involved, in the world that we are in today. The uncertainty factor has risen to the highest levels and therefore I feel that for an entrepreneur to be successful, resilience against these uncertainties is perhaps one of the most important factors, to gain profit or to run a business successfully over time, and that is the reason I wanted to study resilience in a very specific context. Female entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship both are emerging fields in the field of research, as far as Entrepreneurship is concerned, and I thought that the dissertation that studies women as entrepreneurs, taking into account the challenges that COVID posed, would give interesting insights as to how we can improve resilience in women and what are the factors that make women more resilient or less resilient, and why some of them succeeded in thriving despite the difficult times. Whether women are inherently more resilient than men, which factors or which areas require more attention? I think these were the questions that I basically wanted to answer through my research.

Onya

That's great, Bidisha. Tell us a little bit about why the topic is important and you. Can talk about it from a micro, meso and macro level? if you wish.

Speaker 4

So I'll start from the geography perspective first, why I selected India. Firstly, I come from India, so I thought I will be able to better relate to the problems that women face in India and I would be able to interpret their answers better. So when we talk about COVID-19, the impact of COVID-19 on India it’s devastating both on the primary sector as well as on the secondary sector. Interestingly, the msmes, the micro, small and medium enterprises in India were the most affected due to COVID because of the supply chains that got disrupted. When we look at the female entrepreneur percentage in India, they comprise approximately 13 to 14% of the entrepreneurs, but most of them. Actually own msmes, which was the worst hit sector. I think that correlation shows that women entrepreneurs had to face a lot of difficulties during COVID times. Apart from this, there is a report by UN which says that there was this additional impact on women, which was like additional domestic care requirements. In fact, domestic violence levels increased during COVID and they had to actually give up their jobs because of the requirements at home. So these were the additional effects on women in general, not just women entrepreneurs. And despite all of this, there were women who survived, who thrived and whose businesses continued to operate, and I wanted to study basically, what made these women thrive and how these women survived, like what impacted their resilience level and what made them so resilient that day that their businesses still are in operation despite all these difficulties.

Onya

It's really interesting, Bidisha, especially because we see what scholars, what academics refer to as interworld conflict. Where you have the women's role as an entrepreneur conflicts with her role within the family. So you have a clash between the business and. And this is also really important because of the contribution that MSME’s make and then if we look at the percentage of MSME’s  that are female entrepreneurs, if they were hit hardest, they had to sort of go through the challenge this inter-rol conflict. And potentially even deal with domestic violence as well. And that means that we're not just dealing with the health crisis. So everyone's concerned not just about the business they concerned about the health, They're concerned about their staff, they're concerned about their families, as well. Thanks for painting that picture, because that sets the scene for where we're going next. How did you go about studying this phenomenon?

Bidisha

The first part was obviously to go through the previous research work, which has been done in this field. A lot of the papers discussed resilience, but they did not specify resilience against what. So my paper in that way was a bit different and I think very few papers actually discussed resilience in context of a specific calamity or disaster. Also, when I read papers about attributes in women entrepreneurs, the personality attributes, I saw there was a lot of focus on the hard factors like the demographic factors or the educational qualifications, or more intuitiveness, or the leadership style, or the motivation. I think only the recent papers focused more on these factors. So it was important for me to take into account both the hard factors as well as the soft factors when I studied resilience. So when I studied all these papers, I formed a basic framework which I used to analyse the answers of these entrepreneurs later. It was basically based on the work of Schmidlin and Carter, there were two papers. And I mapped 5 key areas that essentially contributed to impact on resilience and these were Business Network, leadership style, motivation, finance, and risk aversion. And in each of these key areas, I again studied the internal factors as well as the external factors. For example, if I talk about business networks for a woman, internal factors would mean personality driven. If I feel difficult to network with people, then yes, it has a negative impact on resilience, but it is an internal factor. External would be not having access to a good network. Not having access to people who can help me grow my business. I think each of these factors have a different set of solutions, like for the internal factors you would have to do something else to improve the internal confidence level of motivation, but to allow or to give access to a network you would have to do like the solutions would be different. So that is how for each of these key areas I had internal factors as well as external factors. So I basically interviewed 15 women and I chose qualitative study because the topic is complex. I wanted a structured approach, but I also wanted to give a lot of space and flexibility to the entrepreneurs when they answer my questions. The recruitment of all these entrepreneurs was through social media. I reached out to them and I remember I just went through the top 50 women entrepreneurs in India and those sorts of lists, and then I approached these women. Fortunately, a lot of them volunteered because they were very much interested in this sort of a study. After that, all the interviews were done through zoom. There were four key themes to all my interviews. The first one was motivation and background. What inspired these women to take up entrepreneurship and what is their background in terms of professional background and educational background? The second was the kind of impact that COVID had on these enterprises and their businesses. The third was the enabling factors to thrive, What did they do in order to survive? And the 4th was the lessons learned. So through these questions I tried to fit their answers into this framework that I had created on the basis of the literature review. So that is how I did my research.

Onya

Thank you for that Bidisha. So we know the how we know who and we know where. What I'm dying to get to is what did you find around what factors enabled these entrepreneurs to thrive when faced with an adversity? This is particularly important because these insights can help them when they face a new crisis. I'd really love to unpack that bit of your research.

Bidisha

So to begin with, all the entrepreneurs faced certain common issues like the health issues, the loss of near and dear ones and the emotional trauma that came with it. So this is common to all. Also I found that 30% of the founders said that they could not get back to the pre COVID levels of operations and till now they are struggling with it. The rest 70% of it have somehow managed to cope up. So when I studied resilience, it was both from an organisational perspective as well as individual perspective. Of course, the focus was more on individual qualities of women entrepreneurs, but at an organisational level, there were essentially 2 factors. One was the upskilling of people, which I noticed that in every organisation what they essentially did is looked at what changes are required and how they can train their people to provide services which became relevant during COVID. For every organisation I think a lot of upskilling was done for the people. Secondly, there was the emotional support system inside the organisation was very, very important for all the organisations. It was actually very heartening to know that despite all these enterprises being social enterprises, 50% of them actually did not retain their full staff and there were no pay cuts, so they actually retained the full staff. In fact, in one of the interviews, one of the ladies mentioned that when they were not able to pay the salary of one of their staff member, they actually help that staff member get another job and once they reverted back to pre COVID levels, that member again came back to the organisation, which shows the kind of emotional bonding and motivation that these teams had amongst themselves. So this was at an organisational level, at an individual level, the framework that I had created, there were five key areas. When I start with Business Network, the first key area, when I studied the academic papers, they mostly say yes, Business Network is important and all of the people that I interviewed, they said that it is important. What was interesting here was that two of my interviewees were Ivy League graduates, and they had extremely good networks because they had access to these networks through their universities. Similarly, there were certain entrepreneurs who were professionals and who had worked in their fields for seven to eight years before getting into entrepreneurship, so these women, they were doctors, they were Chartered Accountants, they also had a very good net. So what I saw was that it's not really a personality issue. If you aid women and if you give them platforms to network with the correct people, then they do not have any networking issues.

Onya

That's really cool. That's a really cool finding Badisha where you identified the role of having social capital or having a good network. What I'm interested in finding out on packing for our listeners is: based on that finding, what sort of policy recommendation would you make? How can policymakers help entrepreneurs? Because, as you said, it's not a trait problem here. It's not about the female entrepreneur herself. Here we're seeing the role of networks and the role that they play in being more resilient. So how can policymakers help entrepreneurs? Particularly female entrepreneurs, who maybe might have struggled or did not have a network? so you have two Ive Leagues, but what about the other women?

Bidisha

I would say in, in these circumstances it would be better to provide networking platforms or groups where they can share the ideas with each other. One is cross learning which is learning from each other, which women can do together and 2nd is to allow them access to the core Business Network, which is not all women but people of influence, people who can mentor them, people who can tell them what kinds of risks are involved, what kinds of uncertainties are involved. And this is not just through universities. It can be done, I think at various levels. Universities of course, I think there was one common theme that came out, I have just talked about business networks right now, but for all the factors that I studied, one of key theme was the role of education, because whether it was finance, whether it was risk taking, whether it was motivation, education played an important role everywhere, it was something that increased the confidence level of women. So at a very primary level, I would say good education that leading to access to good institutions, good university. And for people who have not had access to good education and other things, maybe built platforms where they can interact with these people, seek guidance. I think that is how we can address this issue.

Onya

That was really interesting. So two things that I pulled out of what you said basically is that 2 interventions are introducing mentoring schemes for women, that would help them. And then the Second thing is establishing networking platforms, not just all women platforms, but diverse platforms that they could potentially be a part of. I think that's really interesting because this highlights that funding or financial capital is not the only resource that is needed in adversity. There are other resources that which entrepreneurs need to leverage in order to survive and networks are one of those factors. The other thing that I'd like to also touch on is you talked about the role of education and the role that it played in dealing with adversity, can you talk a little bit more about that findings specifically? So maybe give us some of the data in terms of how did the women who had gone to university or higher education, how did they fare compared to the other Women who maybe did not?

Bidisha

Sure Onya. What I saw was a lot of women who have not studied finance in India specifically were reluctant to take on that role because financial decisions are not generally taken by women in family  household or in domestic environment. So they did not take up that kind of a role even in their families. So that is what impacted I think their self-confidence when it comes to financial decisions. and what most of them preferred was teaming up with somebody who has good financial acumen so that the both of them can run this organisation together. In this also the women who took finance modules, some kind of classes, lectures, there was a CA as well, some of them were very, very confident because even if they told me that even if they have a CA under them, they have a finance team under them, but every financial decision they take the final call when it comes to finance. So again, I thought that Finance is 1 area where self-confidence can be increased through education. So finance and risk aversion were two key areas where I felt education would make a lot of impact. And both of them have a very positive impact on resilience.

Onya

Thank you, Bidisha. And that's really interesting because then we can see areas for intervention where policy makers can come in. It could be something as simple as introducing educational programmes. Now in this instance, even if you have a female entrepreneur who hasn't gone to an Ive League or who didn't have the opportunity to go to higher education, the government providing that support or policy. makers providing that additional education to support their enterprises and their businesses could then enable or feed developing their self efficacy which is their self-confidence. So, I'm really keen to hear a little bit more about what you found when you were talking to these women.

Bidisha

So I talked about business networks and the next one was motivation. So previous academic papers mentioned that women take up entrepreneurship because they become their own bosses and then they are able to attain that work life balance. So there were a couple of papers that mentioned this, but when I actually interviewed the women entrepreneurs, none of them said that they had a better work life balance after taking on entrepreneurship. They said that it is a 24/7 job and you are expected to do that along with everything else in your life and it demands huge commitment and you really need to have very high levels of motivation to pursue entrepreneurship. Almost all of them said that working in a corporate structure or having a fixed job would have been easier, but they opted for entrepreneurship. One of the key factors which they pointed out that was their social standing in the society being an entrepreneur, did give them that sense of self-respect. The second thing is of course the impact that they create through entrepreneurship. So work life balance is never a motivational factor for them.

Onya

My question then is what is this this finding on motivation which differs from what the literature talks about, which says work life balance is usually the motivation for for women starting a business. How does this other motivating factor? How does this lead to resilience or dealing with adversity?

Bidisha

So in general, motivation factors can be grouped into two categories. They are either push factors or pull factors. So push is when you are pushed into entrepreneurship, you may lost a job or your family is undergoing a crisis and that is when you had to take up entrepreneurship because of external circumstances. Pull is more of internal motivation. And internal motivation, Self driven, more of an aspiration to create an impact. For all of these women, it was pull factors because they all had their internal motivations to take on entrepreneurship. This is mentioned in the academic papers before also that entrepreneurs who are driven by pull factors are more resilient because despite adversities and despite everything going wrong, they would still stick to their organisations and they would still have their mission and vision in their mind. They would eventually adapt and evolve and thrive throughout that crisis.

Onya

That's really fascinating and it does align with other studies that have talked about intrinsic motivation, which is that you're internally motivated. And that's really interesting Bidisha. If we take a step back and try to maybe touch a little bit on gender inequality and the structural factors that you alluded to as you were speaking. Can you talk a little bit about how informal institutions, norms and set rules, how they might have played a role in women, actually, then being able to face adversity.

Bidisha

I think after education, the second key common area that came out was the role of social institutions. I would refer social institutions at all levels. For example, let's begin at the family level. A lot of women entrepreneurs said that they had seen their mothers as entrepreneurs or someone else in the family as an entrepreneur. I think that really impacts the motivation level of these people when they see another female entrepreneur in their family who is doing it all successfully. Also all of them said that without their family support, they wouldn't have survived COVID. I think family support was very, very important to all of them. This was at the family level. At a social level. Specifically in India, I would say one of the issues is unpaid domestic work that women do because all of them are expected to do the household tasks, take care of the kids and do everything along with their career goals, professional goals, all or entrepreneurial. So when COVID not happened, people really had to make a choice between the two, whether they would take care of their families or would they take care of their enterprise. So I think that is another social problem at a society level where, you know, women are expected to do take care of all the domestic tasks. The division of domestic tasks between men and women, that is another area which needs to be looked into. The government in itself, In India at least, they are promoting women entrepreneurs, there are various establishments, where they are recognising women entrepreneurs and they are coming up with platforms, they are coming up with financial schemes. But I think in the end, if she has to make a choice between house and work, I think that issue still remains unresolved despite all the other initiatives.

Onya

And that's really fascinating because if we go back to the whole regional mission of of this podcast, we're interested in actors that will work together and bring about transformational structural changes or transformative structural changes. Back to the the context that we're dealing with in this study, women are in a kind of bind here, where you have social structures that are in place and are widely accepted. These social structures have sort of structured the division of labour in a way that women shoulder a lot more of the responsibilities in the home. So you have that, and then you have the female entrepreneur having to deal with adversity, as well. And then you have that conflict, which I talked about earlier when we started the podcast. And so you have women in in. In a position that is very different from the position that male entrepreneurs find themselves. What that sort of highlights to me is that the kind of when policy makers are thinking about ways to support msmes you have female entrepreneurs faced with different set of unique challenges. And these challenges are intertwined with social structures that are at play. So now policymakers need to be thinking about almost customised policies for female entrepreneurs rather than just introducing loans for small businesses, that's not necessarily enough fulfilment, it might be for a male entrepreneur because he's going to go home and everything in the home will be set up and ready for him to go. But the female entrepreneur she most likely has children she's caring for, probably even has elderly parents she's also caring for. So is almost as she is being pulled in different directions and what I think that we can highlight here when it comes to policy recommendations. How come policy makers develop or create solutions that are that are specific that are bespoke rather than a blanket one-size-fits-all policy, that is release for entrepreneurs. So, I think that's actually really interesting finding an area that could potentially be looked into as well. So I'll let you finish up on your findings.

Bidisha

Rightly said, Onya, I think one of the major takeaways from this dissertation was that we can't have blanket policies for both male and female entrepreneurs. Having said that, I would like to highlight. Some of the positive points that came out in the research, one of them was about leadership. Women are more intuitive and they encourage participative environment and work culture in their organisation and this is something that really helped the organisations survive the COVID crisis. I think that was a very positive point. Similarly, in business networks women said that they focus on developing fewer meaningful relationships rather than a large number of weak ties. So a couple of research papers mentioned that for entrepreneurial ventures it is good to have large number of ties even if they are weak ties, so as to have maximum amount of resources. But in a situation like COVID, those few strong ties were the ones which actually helped the organisation survive. Risk aversion, again, 50% of the women I interviewed said that they are risk takers. Of course, the risk taking capability comes from education comes from experience, comes from several other factors, but yes, it can be improved over time. One of the interesting things from the research was how these women entrepreneurs change when they partner with male Co founders because 40% of them have partnered with the male Co founder to establish their entrepreneurial venture and they said that their attributes, their leadership qualities, their motivation, everything gets adapted so that both of them together work in perfect sync for their organisation. So sometimes if the male entrepreneur is more intuitive and more into well-being and more... Is the softer person among the two, then it's the lady who's taking on the numbers role. So that was another interesting thing that I heard from a couple of entrepreneurs there.

Onya

Thank you very much Bidisha. That was super interesting, particularly that last point about the dynamics between the Co founders. So the female, entrepreneur and the male entrepreneur where they try to balance each other out almost like a couple. And so that that was really interesting and it has been so good to have you on pack your dissertation and the research that you conducted on female entrepreneurs based in India, and how they faced adversity, and the factors that actually enabled their resilience. So it was really, really, exciting talking to you about your findings but I wonder if you could maybe give us some last thoughts in terms of now what? Now what for the entrepreneurs?

Bidisha

So I would say those who have already taken the leap, those who are already entrepreneurs, invest into educating yourself even more, keep learning and more of cross learning I would say because technical knowledge, yes, there are different platforms where you can upskill yourself, but cross learning is also important from other women as well as male entrepreneurs. Also, I think make use of the various opportunities that are coming up because it's good to see a lot of initiatives. But I think participating in these initiatives and also voicing your concerns as an entrepreneur in those platforms basically will help the future entrepreneurs maybe solve problems for the future entrepreneurs. So I think be more open about the challenges that you have faced as an entrepreneur, share them with other entrepreneurs and that is how one grows. Even with these 15 entrepreneurs that I interviewed, I think all of them said that they learned a lot from each other during COVID because nobody really envisaged such sort of a situation where lockdown happens and people are not meeting and people completely shift to digital infrastructure. So nobody really knew about it, it was very new to everyone and therefore cross learning was very, very important. So I think for entrepreneurs, it's important to be able to tap into your resources ,to be able to tap into your knowledge and your self-confidence when faced with such kind of situations.

Onya

There you have it folks. We've had some really interesting insights to come out of Bidisha’s research on female entrepreneurs. Again, this is the Life of PIE, first episode and we would love to have you join us on our second episode. We're gonna be touching on another unpacking or opening up another digitation. Sharing, the knowledge Nuggets and findings from that study with you. And one last thing to leave you with. We're starting a conversation here, we're not saying that these are the Answers to all the problems or challenges or these are the answers to grand challenges or wicked problems. What we're triggering and trying to initiate a conversation in order to trigger action. Whether that action is from policymakers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, academics, citizens, female entrepreneurs, male entrepreneurs, so we welcome you and we invite you to join us in this conversation. Thank you. And see you on our next episode.

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