About Longford Women in Business

This unique website was the brainchild of the Longford EQUAL Development Partnership on project EQUAL. EQUAL is a Community Initiative co-financed by the European Union (2000 – 2007).

The development of this website aims to promote female entrepreneurship within County Longford and showcase successful women-led business to encourage more women to consider enterprise as an option.

According to reports by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), increasing the number of women entrepreneurs involved in starting new businesses is critical to a country’s long-term economic growth. Indeed, international comparisons highlight that the world’s most entrepreneurial economies have a high representation of female entrepreneurs. However, most firms are still started and operated by men, with men twice as likely as women to be involved in entrepreneurial activity worldwide, and fewer self-employed women than self-employed men across all business sectors.

On the world scale, Ireland fares low in representation of female entrepreneurs within our society. Project EQUAL aimed to identify the barriers that stop women going down the entrepreneurial road and to help tackle these issues. The main barriers were shown family commitments and access to finance. (If you wish to know more about this research contact Longford Women’s Link).

Longford EQUAL Development Partnership (LEDP) was set up by five local agencies.

And also Centre for Entrepreneurship Research at Dundalk Institute of Technology.

The programme is co-funded through the European Social Fund (ESF). EQUAL seeks to identify and address fundamental forms of discrimination and inequality in the labour market through the development of new and innovative policies and practices initiated by EQUAL Development Partnerships. A range of products were developed around this and are store on the EQUAL Ideas Bank.

A note on Gender Equality

An understanding of gender equality is key to promoting equality for women in business. Even though women constitute 50% of the population, their situation is somewhat similar to that of minority groups because of under-representation in structures of power, wealth and influence. Consequently, enterprise creation policy fails to reflect and support women's unique sectoral focus and approach to business start-up. This gender imbalance can manifest itself and impact directly on women's ability to set up and sustain an enterprise.

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