What is it?
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Question
- Discuss why you think women are less successful than men at attracting capital investment, but are more successful at attracting crowdfunding.
You have 12:00 minutes to plan and write a response to the question. I suggest you divide your time roughly as:
- planning = 3:00 minutes (It's usually a good idea to plan before you start to write.)
- writing = 7:00 minutes, and
- editing = 2:00 minutes.
A helpful strategy
Imagine you are writing for someone who has not read the question you are answering or the article that the question follows up. Your job is to clearly communicate your response to that reader, so it might help to paraphrase the question at the start of your response to it. But you need to rewrite (paraphrase) the idea in the question as a statement.
Because your writing should make sense independently of the question it might be answering, it is usually useful to give background, which can often be done by paraphrasing the question into statements that begin your answer. This is especially important in exams such as IELTS and TOEFL.
Reference
- Warwick, L. & Rogers, L. (2018). Skillful 4: Reading & Writing, Student's Book Pack (2nd. ed.). London: Macmillan Education
It is not obvious why women should be more likely than men to get the money they need for a project such as a new video game, a business start up, or a science experiment, while men beat women when it comes to getting money from venture capital firms, but since those are the facts, we naturally look for an explanation.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I thought of is simple sexist prejudice. The people who run venture capital firms are running traditional businesses, so they are likely to have adopted traditional ideas about what makes for a successful business person, and women are not traditionally as successful in business as men. Consequently, the venture capital firms are less likely to provide money to women who ask for funding that way.
In contrast, crowdfunding, although still much less important than venture capital funding, is the new approach, and because it cuts through the traditional systems by appealing directly to a broad base of people who might both have money to spare and be looking for an investment, it does not have to pass the sexist prejudices of older men making decisions, or of women trained to think like older men making business decisions. Also, by using the internet to directly contact potential investors, the women who opt for crowdfunding are approaching both men and women in more equal numbers, who are more likely to be of a younger generation so inclined to look with favour on efforts of women to create new business, new art, new science or whatever their project is for.
One more idea that occurs to me is that women might seek smaller amounts, and as the economist says, the likelihood of getting a smaller amount of funding is much higher than for a larger sums.
Naturally, it would be useful to have some statistics to check the ideas I've suggested here.
I think that when it comes to attracting capital investment, men are more likely to have the upper hand than women especially in terms of position and occupation. There are more men owning the companies or being placed in the managing position than women which make them a lot more credible and highly regarded, leading them to easily access to the capital investment.
ReplyDeleteAs for crowdfunding, women are generally more sociable and often spend most of their time using the social media applications than men do. So this definitely place women in an advantaged position to attract crowdfunding online. Specially speaking, women love to chat and hang out with friends which make it easier for them to spread the words/recommendation of crowdfunding thing with their friends.