Photo credit: Brimful of Asha
Missed the last Female Tech Founder virtual get together? We’ve got you covered.
Here’s your brief event recap – complete with video excerpts from our fantastic speakers! Thank you again to everyone who spoke. It was brilliant.
Want a little more? You can catch up by listening to the Female Tech Founder podcast on Spotify and all other good podcast outlets.
This event was billed as a virtual group hug and it really felt like that at points – speaker Patricia Gestoso (@p_gestoso), author of Life under lockdown summed it up for all when she said she felt taller at the end!
After a lovely welcome by our fantastic host, Claire-Marie Boggiano (@CMBoggiano), director, Lurig Change Management, Patricia kicked off the event sharing her report on the impact of COVID-19 on professional women’s unpaid work.
Key takeaways were a need for companies to offer employees a greater level of personalisation as far as ‘volunteer days’ goes. The Covid pandemic has unearthed the differences in care giving responsibilities – and this doesn’t apply just to mothers, many single women also shoulder significant responsibilities looking after parents.
Giving employees the opportunity to use ‘volunteer days’ differently goes a long well in helping alleviate the burden particularly because much of the hours clocked equate to work that is unpaid.
During the audience Q&A after Patricia’s talk, long standing Female Tech Founder member and speaker Emma Ryan (@emmaryan) made a fantastic suggestion around logging the hours of unpaid work we do as women if only to put it into perspective. At the very least you know: “I worked for this amount of money last week and got zero pension”.
Here is the video of Patricia’s talk.
The Q&A discussion at the start which Patricia kicked off was all about what we could change in 2021 and Charlotte Ashton (@CharlottAshton), Head of Business Development, Palatine Private Equity and steering committee member Fund Her North was on hand to give some practical advice on getting involved with the Fund Her North community.
Fund Her North is a collective of over 28 women with combined investment power over £450m in the North of England. Whether they are just starting or looking to scale their business, Fund Her North is a unique community of vocal, influential women investors and successful, inspirational entrepreneurs, united to tackle the many barriers facing women accessing investment.
The community has an upcoming event for founders on 4th March focussing on the value Non Executive Directors can bring to a startup. It’s free to attend. Register here.
Here is the video of Charlotte’s talk.
After the positively inspiring Q&A discussion, we had the ever-so-moreish networking breakout sessions and then the event ended with an even more inspirational talk in Ngozi Weller’s lightning talk.
Ngozi Weller (@ngoziweller) is co-founder of Aurora Wellness and a self-proclaimed “accidental CEO”. After “working like she wasn’t a parent and parenting like she didn’t have a job” for a big multinational for many years, a series of unhappy events led her to start the company which supports people like her who have been failed by the work system.
In her words, Aurora Wellness has two branches: on the one hand it supports female entrepreneurs, helping with their productivity and how they manage home care, child care and different ways of working.
On the corporate side, Aurora Wellness supports employees with coaching to enable good mental being in the work place for everybody.
Here’s a video of Ngozi sharing her story.
That’s a wrap, folks! We hope this short summary whetted your appetite for the next!
Join us on Wednesday 24 March, 12-1:30pm for the next Female Tech Founder event. Tickets are going fast, register here!