Why Women Innovate

Lindsey Kunz

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781641377782
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

Part I

Rejecting the “Perfect Path”

1

Rise of The Female Economy

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”

—Harper Lee

A few weeks ago, I was wrapping up an introductory call with a new client when my coworker furiously wrote something down in her notebook and flagged my attention. I was a little confused because I thought the call was going well. The client was thrilled with the product demo and I’d covered all of my bases for the project milestones. When she flipped her notebook around so I could see what she’d written, my first thought was, “Oh, duh.” She’d scribbled the word WHY?

Why was this information important to our new client? I had explained what our product was and how the client would use it, but my coworker was reminding me to highlight the most foundational part: Why did it matter? This logic can be applied to just about anything in life. It can even be applied to this book. I fully intend to explain what it looks like when women innovate and how they go about doing it, but first I want to answer the question, “Why do women innovate?” Why does it matter, and why should we care?

Why Women Innovate

Before we can understand why women innovate, we need to understand what innovation is. Throughout this book I’ll be referring to innovation as the act of making changes in something established by introducing something new. In the twenty-first century, innovation does not mean creating something completely from scratch—it means taking something that already exists and making it better. However, like much of our language, the word innovation has evolved over time.

Canadian historian Benoît Godin explained that for centuries, the term innovation actually had a negative connotation.10 In the seventeenth century, if someone was called an innovator, it was meant as a scathing accusation. Given the pervasive religious context of seventeenth century Europe, anything considered an “innovative” interpretation of doctrine was akin to heresy.11 Furthermore, the concept of doctrinal newness was associated with the Puritan Revolution, which added to the derogatory connotation of the word.12 Even after the Reformation, the negative association persisted until the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.13

Not exactly the glowing buzzword we know it as today. The shift from negative to positive connotation can be attributed to the Industrial Revolution and innovation’s association with technological invention.14 During the early twentieth century, technology became widely recognized as a contributing factor to both social and economic progress. “Many started using technological innovation (or simply innovation without determinative) to talk about ‘social change’ and ‘economic development,’” Godin explained.15 Over the past few decades, the word has evolved into its modern meaning—a creative way to bring new technologies to market.16

Bringing new technologies to market seems like a fairly gender-neutral activity, until you realize men and women have entirely different approaches to achieving this common goal. Additionally, having a male versus female perspective influences the type of new technologies being brought to the market. In short, innovation looks different for men and women.

In today’s culture, there is such an urgent striving toward equality that we’ve forgotten to acknowledge both the power and importance of our gendered differences. We’ve also fallen prey to the limiting belief that in order to be equal, we must be the same. I would like to challenge that belief because it wrongly frames differences as weaknesses rather than strengths. Think of oil and water. They are different elements, yet equally important to bake the perfect batch of brownies. Without the influence of one or the other, your brownies will be sub-par. How much more of a tragedy would it be to remove the influence of gender from something as important as the innovative process?

I’m not the only person challenging this limiting belief. In 2016, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published their Gender Summit Report introducing the concept of gendered innovation.17 A main takeaway was that we need to recognize biological and sociocultural sex-gender differences in order to enhance our innovation policies.18 This new approach acknowledged our societies and economies are deeply gendered and sought to promote socioeconomic advancements in light of these differences.19

When you ignore the differences between men and women, it’s easy to assume equality in outcomes.20 Unfortunately, when you assume equality in outcomes, you fail to recognize women’s needs and wants may be different than men’s needs and wants.21 Gendered innovation asks, “Will the resulting goods and services work equally well for women and men?”22 From what I’ve observed, twenty-first-century women innovate to ensure that the goods and services being produced meet their specific needs.

Women innovate because:

• Their needs are not being met by the market.
• Their preferences deserve to be recognized.
• Their perspective has the right to influence policy.

Simply put, women are trying to create a better world for themselves than the one they were given. Over the past decade, women have showed up in the economic space in a big way. It wasn’t until I started paying attention to the economy at large that I started noticing the numerous ways women innovate.

“Women now drive the economy,” Michael Silverstein and Kay Sayre of the Harvard Business Review claimed.23 In 2009, the writers published an article dubbing this phenomenon The Female Economy.24 When I first heard this term I tensed and thought, “Why can’t we just be part of the normal economy?” But I soon uncovered some research that explained why The Female Economy was actually different than the economy as a whole. In her article titled, “The Silent Rise of The Female-Driven Economy,” Danielle Kayembe pointed out that The Female Economy is all about products and services created by women for women.

In order to understand why women aren’t satisfied with how things are done, we must examine where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going.25 Once we have a better understanding of what brought about The Female Economy, we’ll be able to see why the female perspective matters and why women’s preferences deserve to be recognized.

Where We’ve Been

“Even though women are half the population, we live in a world where it’s taken for granted that the male perspective should be centered,” Danielle explained.26 From a historical perspective, men have driven both infrastructure and industry. That means our society’s products and practices are largely influenced by the male perspective. Because of the pervasive male influence, the female perspective is less pronounc...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. Rejecting the “Perfect Path”
• Part II. Laying a New Foundation
• Part III. Creating a Sustainable Career
• Appendix