Women took a career hit during the pandemic, and many turned to entrepreneurship
This is Working Together, a weekly series on equity in the workplace. This week, we’re taking a deep dive into new LinkedIn data on how the pandemic has influenced entrepreneurship. Read the full report here.
Mirella Siciliano thought about starting her own consulting business for several years, but the pandemic gave her the push she needed to venture out on her own.
As a former senior buyer at Barney’s, she watched the New York retailer go through bankruptcy in 2019. And then, when the pandemic hit, she saw how the world of work would change and decided it was time to start her own firm.
“ I saw an opportunity to continue my career and create new skills while still remaining at home and juggling my family,” the 42-year-old mother of two said.
Siciliano is one of countless female entrepreneurs who have started new businesses in the last couple of years. Just 35% of U.S.-based founders on LinkedIn identify as female, according to LinkedIn data. But these numbers are on the rise: Female-founded companies grew by 27% between the pre-pandemic and mid-pandemic periods LinkedIn recently examined. And in retail — Siciliano’s industry — women-led companies grew by 81% during that period.
The pandemic had a devastating impact on the careers of millions of women, and there are 1.8 million fewer women in the workforce today. With women taking on a majority of childcare responsibilities as schools across the country closed, many couldn’t continue to meet the demands of their jobs. For some of these women, starting a company provided much-needed flexibility and control over their schedules.
Zana Nanic was a strategy manager at Google until she started her own sustainable fashion brand, Reclaim, six months after the first shelter-in-place order in 2020. Nanic sources a majority of her products from Italy. With global supply chains largely shutting down at the height of the pandemic, she said it was a stressful time to try and start a new company.
Still, the 30-year-old says she believes her mental health improved during the pandemic, allowing her business to thrive even more.
“People would think, ‘Oh, pandemic, you think you are alone and stuck at home,’ but my experience was the opposite,” she said. “I had less stimulants and fewer social comparisons.”
While retail saw significant growth in female-founded firms during the pandemic, traditional startup industries like software and IT continue to be dominated by men. 82% of software firms launched between July 2020 and 2021 were founded by men, according to LinkedIn data.
Lina Colucci founded her first business — Edge Analytics — right before the pandemic and is working on her second company now. Both startups were geared toward ensuring client companies — which multinationals like Nike and Google — have enough data to train their artificial intelligence algorithms to behave correctly on their platforms.
Colucci — who earned her undergraduate degree at Duke and University of North Carolina before attending a joint masters program at Harvard and MIT — sees the discrepancy in gender from her fellow founders in the industry. While she felt surrounded by female peers during her time in the academic world, that dynamic shifted since she started her own companies.
Only 22% of AI professionals across the globe are female, compared to 78% who are male, according to LinkedIn data.
“After getting into companies and industry, I am frequently the only woman on the call or the room. It is quite different,” she said. “I get it, it is hard, but it was a really striking difference.”
As for Siciliano, she says she feels the pressure of trying to push a business along during a global pandemic. Still, she can’t imagine taking another step at this point in her career.
“When you become an expert in a certain field, it’s fulfilling to go out and start something on your own,” she said.