How can female entrepreneurs thrive in male-dominated industries | Perspectives with Rixt Herklots
Perspectives with Rixt Herklots
Director of The Next Women NL
This week’s guest in Perspectives is Rixt Herklots, a feminist whose position as Director of The Next Women allows her to empower female entrepreneurs and make a positive impact on society.
The Next Women provides women with the tools they need to build successful companies, tools that can be difficult to come by in the male-dominated field of entrepreneurship. Rixt helps ensure a space in which knowledge, network, and capital can be accessed by women, establishing a business ecosystem of equal opportunities, equal role models, equal investments, and equal representation.
“What’s my dream? Well, the dream is a world of equality”
Given the Next Women’s mission, this comes as no surprise. But how can we make this world a reality? During the podcast, we talk about the obstacles standing in the way of progress, and how the Next Women is overcoming these to support new perspectives in business that enrich the entire sector.
We discover one of the biggest challenges is actually starting conversations. Rixt shares some hard-hitting research that, out of 66 countries, in the Netherlands there exists the biggest discrepancy between the perception and reality of attitudes towards equality.
“We think we’re very open-minded, relaxed, gezellig. But the way that we act, we’re very conservative, very us versus them. That makes conversations about feminism, about racism, about equality, about inclusivity, super difficult here, because we first have to have the discussion that it’s actually a relevant topic.”
The difficulty of educating on these issues has been relevant to both Rixt’s personal and professional lives. The conversation turns towards figuring out how everyone can shoulder the burden of redressing the gender imbalance so that the brunt of the work doesn’t fall on women. By amplifying the issue and putting more female entrepreneurs in the spotlight, change can occur naturally. And as with all systemic changes, the process is gradual.
“I don’t see us getting there in the next 10 years. Maybe not even in my lifetime. But if we all keep working towards that, then at some point we need to get there.”
The path to a more gender-equal and equitable society may be an uphill struggle, but one that organisations like the Next Women and people like Rixt are committed to battle.
Catch the full conversation below where we discuss accidentally finding your purpose, collaborating across gender to improve the world for everyone, and the work of The Next Women.