Students at Georgetown University launched a new organization to address the gender gap and lack of mentorship for young girls interested in pursuing business careers Feb. 3.
Early Entrepreneurs, which aims to teach middle school girls the basics of starting their own businesses, looks to address a gap in women’s access to learning the same entrepreneurial skills as young men. The club is currently in the process of developing a curriculum for its outreach program and arranging mentorship between Georgetown students and their mentees.
Nicole Ridel (MSB ’28), Early Entrepreneurs’s founder, said being a woman in the business field inspired her to found the organization.
“We’ve noticed that there’s such a severe gender gap in the business field,” Ridel told The Hoya. “We want to change that and fight that statistic. Our mission is to go to middle schools and interact with young girls and teach them about business and all the basics of business and inspire them to pursue business.”
Teodora Ivosevic (MSB ’28), the vice president of Early Entrepreneurs, said the group’s goal is to serve as role models to inspire young girls interested in entrepreneurship.
“We wanted to dedicate it to younger girls who should know that they can be assertive,” Ivosevic told The Hoya. “They can start their own business. They can have their own goals and their own missions.”
Early Entrepreneurs’ programming, which is still under development, will include a marketing and financial literacy curriculum. Participants will then be challenged to start their own businesses under the guidance of Georgetown students.
According to a 2024 McKinsey report, only 29% of C-suite executive roles are held by women. Women are also disproportionately passed over for men in entry-level roles, the report finds, and for every 100 men who received their first promotion in 2024, only 81 women were promoted.
Henrietta Benziger (CAS ’28), the organization’s treasurer, said women and girls face social obstacles when starting businesses.
“The problem is not necessarily a lack of female entrepreneurs in the world — far from it. Rather, I believe the obstacle lies in society’s close-minded view of successful entrepreneurship,” Benziger wrote to The Hoya. “To address this, we hope to not only give girls the skills and understanding of how to start and operate a company but also introduce role models across a diversity of entrepreneurial experiences to expand their idea of what success and impact look like.”
Benziger said getting involved in the business world was challenging for her due to a lack of specific resources.
“Outside of my home, there was only antagonistic messaging,” Benziger wrote. “In conversations with other women, it seems that this is a shared experience: Sometime in middle school, we start believing we’re inherently “bad” at maths; we identify ourselves as stability lovers instead of risk-takers; and we diminish or downplay any entrepreneurial qualities we do exhibit out of due humility.”
Benziger said that her experiences in a majority-male field inspired her to join Early Entrepreneurs.
“I want to be the positive voice, influence and role model that I wish I’d had in school at that critical transition moment where societal stereotypes begin to take root in young girls’ minds,” Benziger wrote.
“Many of my other roles on campus are incredibly male-dominated, and while I am happily friends with all my peers, I look forward to building this all-women space as a way to foster a community with shared experiences and struggles,” she added.
Benziger said the group is continuing to develop its curriculum and plan for future outreach as it coordinates logistics with school district leaders.
Ivosevic said the club’s ultimate goal is to reshape norms around what is considered socially acceptable for girls.
“Both of us have noticed, being in classes, there’s just this large disparity. Young girls are kind of taught not to be bossy, not to be aggressive, to kind of be, as silly as it sounds, demure and not have entrepreneurial thinking,” Ivosevic said. “And that’s something that I feel like shouldn’t be the case at all.”