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Part I | How Quebec supports women-led ventures? A leading example with room for improvement

1 day ago4 min read

Context & motivations


I’ve spent nearly a decade working for entrepreneurs and startups, and like many of you, I’ve heard the same conversations over and over—how we need to better support women entrepreneurs. I’ve seen countless initiatives launched to help, empower, or raise awareness—even started one myself. So when it came time to choose a topic for my master’s thesis at HEC Paris, I wondered: Is there really anything new to uncover about women entrepreneurs in Quebec?


Now living in Europe, my home province seems quite progressive when it comes to women in the workforce. From a distance, it looks like women have it pretty good. In fact, Quebec has the highest employment rate for women in Canada, with subsidized child care programs that have significantly shaped today’s high maternal employment rates and dual-income households (Statistics Canada, 2024, Choi, 2023). This also makes Quebec an ideal setting to examine entrepreneurship without the influence of cultural attitudes toward working women and mothers.


Table 1: Employment rate among core-aged women in Quebec in 2024

The vertical axis shows 10 provinces and Canada. The horizontal axis shows percentages from 77% to 86%. The bars represent the employment rate among core-aged women in February 2024. The bar representing Canada is in red, while the bars representing the provinces are in blue.
The vertical axis shows 10 provinces and Canada. The horizontal axis shows percentages from 77% to 86%. The bars represent the employment rate among core-aged women in February 2024. The bar representing Canada is in red, while the bars representing the provinces are in blue.

Plus, working in Montreal’s startup ecosystem, I saw firsthand how much the government invested in entrepreneurship—both broadly and in women-led ventures. Yet, when it came time to submit my thesis topic, I still found myself typing: How do incubators and accelerators support women-led ventures? I consider such organizations key entry points to the startup ecosystem and a window into its broader culture.


The following week, I started digging into the numbers—government investments, women-focused funds, initiatives, and networks. Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. However, as I looked deeper, I discovered that in Québec, 20% of businesses are majority owned by women, a figure that has remained consistent for a few years now (Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, 2023). Not bad, I thought. But then I came across another statistic: 80% of all women entrepreneurs in Canada are self-employed.


Wait—does this mean that only 20% of this 20% are what we could call not self-employed? You can do the math—it’s a very small number. I then found that self-employment among women has grown at a faster rate than among men, with a 315% increase between 1976 and 2021 (Cukier et al., 2022). This could signal a strong interest in entrepreneurship—great. But at the end of the day, we all know that self-employment, while valuable, doesn’t carry the same long-term economic impact as other types of ventures.


So, despite all the investments and efforts in Quebec, why are there still so few women entrepreneurs? Something wasn’t adding up. Was it just a matter of getting more women into STEM and tech? Or was there something deeper at play? Do we simply need more time—another decade, maybe? Or is there a fundamental reason so many women are choosing self-employment over high-growth entrepreneurship?


To find potential explanations, I turned to the literature. My initial dive led me to feminist theories on support programs. Liberal feminism advocates for equal opportunity, while radical feminism calls for structural change. I found incredible insights, but the more time passed, it became clear to me that I didn’t want to frame this discussion as women versus men or further divide genders. I have amazing men in my life who truly support women, and I believe that both men and masculinity have their place in our society. So, my goal here is to build awareness (Part I), share key results (Part II), and offer practical solutions (Part III) to better support women entrepreneurs.


My next step was to reach out to professors and researchers in the field. I booked meetings with five professors from four different universities in Quebec to hear their perspectives. Opinions were divergent, and I quickly realized this was a sensitive topic. Having already reviewed some of the literature, I knew that the motivations driving women into entrepreneurship have been widely studied: autonomy, personal fulfillment, flexibility, and financial potential (Carrier et al., 2006). But one insight stood out for this research: Women’s entrepreneurship is often an escape from male-dominated corporate cultures (Harrison et al., 2020).


Professor Émilie Genin, a Human Resource Management expert at the School of Industrial Relations at Université de Montréal, pointed me toward workforce research showing that as women climb the corporate ladder, their environment becomes increasingly male-dominated, forcing them to adapt in order to succeed. I had witnessed this firsthand although corporate spaces are slowly changing. Then, another professor raised a parallel: The startup ecosystem is largely built by men and for men.


I had a lot of questions: Do women entrepreneurs face the same barriers in the startup world as they do in corporate spaces? Are there unspoken rules in the startup ecosystem that they must navigate to succeed? And if corporate spaces are too masculine, and the startup world mirrors this, where do women go?


Well, well... self-employment, perhaps?


To answer these questions and validate (or invalidate) my hypotheses, I conducted 18 in-depth interviews with a diverse group: eight early-stage female entrepreneurs, five program managers from incubators and accelerators, and five industry experts.


Stay tuned for the next blog, where I’ll share key findings from my interviews. It turns out they are far more nuanced than anticipated. Some of the results are truly unexpected while others were aligned with my intuition, shedding new light on the challenges and opportunities for women entrepreneurs in Quebec.


Write to hello@venture-haus.com to access the full thesis or collaborate.


References


 
 
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