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By Deborah Bonello, Ozy
Diet-friendly cocktail snacks dominate the downtown Mexico City
opening of Mia, a women-only coworking space: wafer-thin cucumber
slices wrapped around grilled prawns and roasted mushrooms topped with
small blobs of cream cheese. Two DJs, a pair of svelte young women from
Havana, nod their heads in unison to electronic beats. But there’s more
than fun and food on the menu here.
The new workspace is on the sixth floor of a classic old building
overlooking the majestic Monumento a la Revolución, the monument
commemorating the Mexico Revolution. The launch attendees — there are as
many men as women sipping pink champagne — are plotting their own
revolution.
Mexico City had no women-only coworking spaces just four years ago. Mia (the feminine version of mine
in Spanish), which opened in October, is one of three such spaces, two
of which have launched over the past year. These spaces — Co-Madre and
Spacioss are the others — are trying to level the playing field for
female entrepreneurs
in Mexico by creating communities and platforms that encourage them to
succeed. Together, the three coworking spaces can accommodate around 400
women. Their emergence coincides with a fundamental shift playing out
in the capital of a country that is part of a region known for macho
attitudes and the subjugation of women.
We want to have this space to support each other.
Marisse de Olmo, co-founder, Mia
Ten
years ago, according to business research conducted by Mia’s
co-founders, seven out of 10 women left their jobs when they started
families in Mexico City. Today, women are leaving their jobs less and
less, and those who do are often doing so for entrepreneurial ventures,
according to co-founder Marisse de Olmo. In fact, women are actually
launching more businesses than men in Mexico, according to the Global
Entrepreneurship Monitor. But ventures launched by women are slower to
grow and more likely to fail, according to Olmo. That gap in support for
working women is at the core of what these new coworking spaces are
hoping to fill, by providing services and facilities aimed at women’s
needs: childcare facilities, spa installations and workshops targeting a
female audience.
“We want to have this space to support each
other, from self-esteem through to connecting with banks supporting
women starting a business,” says Olmo.
For sure, the U.S., U.K.
and even Spain have women’s co-working spaces. But in Latin America,
they stand out as a rarity even though coworking spaces have in general
grown fast – they went up by 50 percent in Brazil in 2016.
Personal experiences have influenced at least some of the founders in their decision to set up these coworking spaces.
Maria Galindo, one of Co-Madre’s directors, recalls how one of her
co-founders needed to continue working when she had a small child. “She
rented a house and created a nursery so she could carry on working but
still see her son — and from the root of this a new business was born,”
says Galindo. “We realized that it’s not just mothers that need this but
women in general.”
That need for support remains immense in
Mexico, even with the sharp rise in the number of women entrepreneurs.
Only 12 percent of the companies that received venture capital funding
last year in Mexico were founded by women or had a woman on their
management team, according to figures from the Mexican recruitment
platform APLI.
“All of this money flowing
to innovative companies that are creating jobs and generating value in
the economy isn’t coming to nor being controlled by women — so where is
it going?” asks Maria Ariza, director of Mexico’s newly launched stock market BIVA, who points out that only 9 percent of Mexico’s major startups are headed by women.
The
lack of “access to financial support and inspiration and
self-confidence,” as well as contacts, is in part to blame for the
failure and slow growth that hobbles more women-led businesses than
ventures led by men, says Olmo.
But things are changing. Although
the venture capital investment in women-fronted companies in Mexico is
low, it is ahead of the U.S., where female entrepreneurs receive only
about 2 percent of all venture funding, despite owning 38 percent of
businesses, according to the Harvard Business Review. Female leaders may be underrepresented in the startup world, but both Google and Facebook in Mexico are headed by women.
And
while machismo and prejudices against women in Mexico are strong, the
country’s startup business environment doesn’t suffer from U.S.-style
“bro” and hacker cultures, says Federico Antoni, a founding partner of
Antoni Lelo de Larrea Venture Partners, an early-stage VC fund. “I think
that is a reason to explain why the participation of female founders is
bigger in Mexico,” says Antonio.
He agrees that women-only
coworking spaces have a logic. Coed coworking spaces in Mexico have
exploded in recent years, and the market is currently dominated by
WeWork. These women-only spaces are creating competition and responding
to demand. But Antoni isn’t sure that segregation is right for
innovation.
“One of the cornerstones of innovation
and the entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world is the power of
collaboration, and that collaboration is powerful because of the
diversity of its participants,” he says. Because most partners of VC
firms in Mexico are male, what’s really needed is for such men to move
to these new women-focused coworking spaces, Antonio argues. “It is very
difficult to create that diversity if you only have one gender point of
view.”
All of the founders of the women’s spaces emphasize that
they allow male employees of women-led companies to enter, and for
meetings to take place within their premises with men from external
companies. At the same time, these coworking spaces are particularly
attractive to firms whose businesses target women.
Anahi Rivera,
who owns a firm that sells vintage versions of known labels, has space
in Co-Madre. “I loved the concept of only women and the idea of us
supporting each other,” she says. “My business has a lot to do with
women … and it’s great for networking.”
It’s still early days for
this emerging set of women-only coworking spaces in Mexico City. And
just how much they help in improving the investment climate
for female entrepreneurs remains a question. But they’re already doing
something more fundamental: creating communities that allow sister
entrepreneurs to believe they can succeed in a world where they’ve been
told they can’t. By themselves.
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