Hong Kong Female Expat Entrepreneurs Discriminated Against By Investors

Although Hong Kong gives the best gender balance on investment panels, for female entrepreneurs it’s still a man’s world.

Entreprenuers need funding more than anything else, but the females of the species tend to have a hard time in Hong Kong. According to a recent survey, too many female talents aren’t getting the financial help they need due to a preponderance of men on investment boards. However, one sympathetic backer is attempting to rebalance the issue by helping female entrepenuers get the start-up cash they need.

CEO of Empact28 Emily Lam-Ho told the media she’d met a large number of brilliant women on her travels around the world, many of whom were heading up important businesses as well as building and creating, but very few were getting the funding they deserved. Her company does all it can to support such women by funding global female-led projects as well as start-ups with an environmental or social impact.

Many of the women she’s met and helped told her they’d pitched again and again to rooms full of male investors with little or any success, leading her to realise there’s a major lack of diversity in the world of investment. Lam-Ho is now questioning why women aren’t better represented in the world of investment, as it’s women who compose most of the world’s consumer bases and are the major decision-makers.

Having men decide what’s best for the consumer doesn’t make any sense, as it’s women who mostly make the decisions as to what to buy and when.In spite of the result of the survey, just 5 per cent of investors are women, leading to the impression that the sector truly is an exclusive men’s club, leaving talented females no option but to self-fund their ideas if they can.