Raising female entrepreneurs' profile

ACCORDING to Andrea Cassidy: 'Starting your own business is one of the most nerve-wracking things you can go through.' But she thought she had a good idea, and decided to run with it.

A new study shows that women are less willing than men to spend their time being unpaid tax-gatherers, book-keepers, form-fillers and social workers, all of which go with being an entrepreneur and starting a business. That is how it looks to the Government's Small Business Service and business advisers Ernst & Young, whose joint study, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, shows about 7.7 Britons in a hundred are involved in starting or running a new business.

That puts Britain somewhere in the middle of the 29 countries surveyed, showing Chancellor Gordon Brown has some way to go with his aim of creating 'a true enterprise culture'. But Britain sinks down the international entrepreneurship charts when it comes to the number of women going it alone. In Italy and New Zealand, men and women are more or less level pegging but British men are two and a half times more likely than women to be an entrepreneur.

It does not seem to have much to do with women being too busy with children. But British men, the researchers find, are nearly twice as likely be confident of having the skills to get a business going. One possible reason is that a man is more likely than a woman to know an entrepreneur, and so to say: 'If so-and-so can do it, so can I.' Yet there is no gender difference in fear of failure once the decision to go for it is taken.

Andrea, 39, a Londoner, is an occupational psychologist who used to advise companies on how far a prospective employee was likely to fit in, from the point of view of personality, values and behaviour under pressure. She said: 'I was watching a Kilroy show one day, and the discussion was about children who are mistreated or even killed by their nannies or the au pair, when a woman in the audience said 'We know all about a nanny's references and CVs but how much do we know about the personality behind them?'

This gave Andrea the idea. It is called Profiling People (www.profilingpeople.com), which offers parents a psychometric testing service to work out whether a child carer is likely to be a good fit. It costs between £115 and £290. She took advice about whether the idea would work from Business Link for London, part of the Small Business Service.