Young Rich’s gender divide

It is with a great sense of pride that we have been flicking through today’s BRW Young Rich edition.

As Patrick Stafford explains, 11 individuals on the Young Rich have previously featured as members of our Smart50 Awards, including Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar of Atlassian, Leigh Jasper and Rob Philpot of Aconex and Sitepoint founder and serial entrepreneur Mark Harbottle.

We think that recognising Australia’s great up-and-coming entrepreneurs is one of the most important things we do here at SmartCompany and we love it when the companies we follow do big deals, attract top-flight investors (as all of the entrepreneurs mentioned above have done in the last 18 months) and are recognised on lists such as the Young Rich.

The magazine is, as always, a great read. There are lots of exciting entrepreneurs in there and there’s a real sense that the tech entrepreneurs have made great strides in the last 12 months. We’ll take a deeper look at the trends from the list on Monday.

However, my brief reading of the list suggests there is one thing missing: women.

There are just eight women on this year’s list, compared to 13 on last year’s list and 20 when the first Young Rich list was published in 2005.

The remaining women – Natalie Bloom, Carolyn Creswell, Prue Ealies, Kristina Karlsson, Heidi Middleton, Kylie Radford, Karrie Webb and sass&bide pair Sarah-Jane Clarke and Heidi Middleton – are all brilliant entrepreneurs.

But the fact that the number of women on these rich lists continues to fall is extraordinarily disappointing, particularly in a year when so much noise has been made about increasing the number of women on boards and in executive roles at the top end of town.

These numbers are improving (painfully) slowly, but the Young Rich list and BRW‘s main Rich 200 list (where the number of women has fallen from 17 to 15 over the past decade) does suggest we also need to be thinking of ways to support women who want to turn their fast-growing SME into a larger business.

Let’s put every idea on the table.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Melanie Kansil, chief executive of Customers Underground and member of female entrepreneur network Head Over Heels, who suggested the fact that women find it harder to get capital from investors is a major inhibitor for women-owned businesses.

Could we have a government fund (perhaps in partnership with the private sector) dedicated to supporting female entrepreneurs, just as we have funds dedicated to technology or the health sector?

Could we provide more support to female entrepreneur networks, so they can be strengthened and expanded?

Could we encourage large companies to follow the lead of Wal-Mart, which last week said it will spend $US20 billion over the next five years to buy specifically from women-run companies?

If we want to break the glass ceiling of the rich list, we need to become proactive.