The United Nations’ Women's Entrepreneurship Day took place last week and was an inspiration-filled day designed to celebrate, inspire and empower women in business.
The hybrid event featured a range of amazing speakers that spoke to their experiences as women in business and shared insights on this year’s theme: Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, Crypto and Web 3.0. Here’s a summary of what resonated most with the Bastion Shine wāhine who went along:
INSPIRE: The power of authenticity and relatability
Simran Kaur, Founder of Girls that Invest, championed the power of authenticity and relatability as key factors in the success of her Girls that Invest empire. She revealed the perception that successful businesswomen need to be assertive, and sadly, calculating ‘girlbosses’ initially steered her away from pursuing a career in entrepreneurship.
When Simran started up her educational podcast around investment, it wasn’t wearing sharp blazers and discussing the glass ceiling, but rather chatting all things finance with her co-host and drawing in listeners that could relate to her as a friend rather than an educator, cultivating the perfect audience for her content.
EMPOWER: Web 3.0 is a force for social change
The overarching theme of Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, multiple speakers shared their insights on the opportunity that is Web 3.0. Essentially a new generation of the internet that promotes decentralisation and ownership for users, Web 3.0 has the potential to create powerful communities as vehicles for change, but there needs to be more female and minority representation across areas such as NFT, data collection and coding to ensure Web 3.0 is built without bias.
We heard from Olivia Dyet, Co-Founder of GlobalKind NFT, who describe themselves as the biggest, kindest NFT movement in the metaverse. Olivia talked about how GlobalKind NFT is bringing positive social change to the world, through the intersection of nature and technology and that harnessing the power of female-led communities in the metaverse unlocks life-changing potential.
CELEBRATE: Failure is a platform for learning
Annah Stretton was the recipient of the Women Entrepreneurship Award alongside Kendall Flutey, co-founder of financial education platform Banqer. Annah discussed her journey from well-known New Zealand fashion designer to founding social impact start-up, RAW.
While RAW is an incredibly successful charitable organisation serving women who have been incarcerated, Annah spoke candidly about how it began as a failed project. She impressed the importance of seeking education in order to make a positive social change, and that failure is just another platform to learn from.
