A New Programme Aims To Address Gender Inequalities In The Startup World

Women with an innovative idea or concept who need support bringing that idea to life can now apply to a new programme offered by The Factory.

Launching on International Women’s Day (8 March 2022), Moxie is a seven week programme that focuses on building female founders.

“For many women, entrepreneurship and innovation can seem daunting and they might lack confidence or support to follow through with their ideas,” explains Rachel O’Connor, General Manager – Marketing and Programmes for The Factory. “There are also long-standing gender inequalities in the startup world where women represent just one in every five startup founders globally.”

The picture is more positive in the Manawatū. Over the past ten years The Factory has run Innovate, a 10-week accelerator programme for entrepreneurs, 42 percent of winners have been women.

“While we have had a good number of female founders win Innovate in the past decade, we’re keen to see this number increase and Moxie is one way The Factory is supporting female founders bring their ideas to life,” confirms Nick Gain, Acting Chief Executive Officer for The Factory.

It might be surprising for some to learn that women-led startups achieve 35% higher return on investment and bring in 12% higher revenue than male-owned tech companies. Yet, according to Angel Association New Zealand, women-led ventures receive just 18 percent of early-stage investment in New Zealand.

The name of the programme truly represents it’s ethos – courageous spirit, determination and perserverance. The programme will be run as a series of workshops with inspiration experts who will covering topics such as self-belief and resilience, productivity and time management; putting plans into action; and start-up founders sharing their journey, including previous Innovate participants.

As well as the workshops, participants will have access to The Factory team to support and guide them as they learn.

Applications close on 9 April 2022, with the programme commencing in early May.

To find out more about Moxie, visit moxie.kiwi

Ends.

About The Factory

We are a team of curious individuals that thrive to support entrepreneurs, founders, startups and companies. We are a business development, training and innovation hub located in Palmerston North, Manawatū that works nationwide.

We help individuals, startups and companies with new ideas begin the process of scaling and becoming contributors to our communities. We have established ourselves as a world leader in business acceleration and are specialists in agritech, agrifood and new technologies.

Our expertise working with founders, start-ups and business owners runs deep, having been established 15+ years ago, and being a Callaghan Innovation Founder Incubator contract holder since 2006, and having supported over 4,000+ entrepreneurs and start-ups.

The Factory is owned by a non-for-profit Trust (Bio Commerce Centre Trust), that was established for the purpose of entrepreneur highway, to find and fund high growth high value startups. We couldn’t do this without our Government partner Callaghan Innovation and stakeholders that help keep the lights on and engine humming.

© Scoop Media