Where are the films starring successful women entrepreneurs?
<p><a href="https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-inventor-out-for-blood-in-silicon-valley">The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley</a>, now streaming in Australia on Binge, depicts Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes as a bewitching sociopath.</p>
<p>Holmes wanted to revolutionise health care by providing a simple and cheap way to perform blood tests using only a finger prick. In 2003, she founded Theranos, with a vision of the company’s machines in every home in America.</p>
<p>But, as the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-has-struggled-with-blood-tests-1444881901">revealed</a> in 2015, Holmes created an intricate web of deception. Even as machines found their way into chemists and were being used by medical insurance companies, they never actually worked.</p>
<p>Holmes put patients’ lives at risk and cost investors millions of dollars.</p>
<p>The documentary is compelling viewing, but as it enters a very slim field of movies about female entrepreneurs it is worth questioning the impact of the stories we choose to tell.</p>
<p><strong>Fall from grace</strong></p>
<p>The journey Holmes took from young idol to spectacular failure is a story about systemic issues and the <a href="https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valley-work-culture/">sometimes toxic</a> culture of the world of start-ups.</p>
<p>Prior to the scandal breaking, Holmes was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler">celebrated in the media</a>. She was portrayed as a Stanford University dropout with a vision for changing the world. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars from powerful men in a start-up landscape known for its <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/01/how-the-vc-pitch-process-is-failing-female-entrepreneurs">discriminating funding practices</a>.</p>
<p>She made the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/#338f337c47a7">cover</a> of Forbes magazine in 2014 as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Holmes represented a heady mix of tech, science and business. She was the golden girl of the start-up world.</p>
<p>This made her fall from grace even more spectacular.</p>
<p>But compare Holmes’ portrayal with another well known example of a deceitful male entrepreneur: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/28/wolf-of-wall-street-jordan-belfort-sex-drugs">Jordan Belfort</a>, the “wolf of Wall Street”.</p>
<p>Belfort ran an elaborate crime scheme linked to manipulating the stock market and was jailed for 22 months for securities fraud. Nonetheless, his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/522776.The_Wolf_of_Wall_Street">autobiography</a> and Martin Scorsese’s 2013 <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993846/">film adaptation</a> depict Belfort’s story as celebration of wealth and power, rather than a critical review of his fraudulent behaviour.</p>
<p><strong>Where are all the good stories?</strong></p>
<p>Feature films about female entrepreneurs are few and far between.</p>
<p><a href="https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.21276abstract">Research</a> from one of the authors examined English-language films from 1986 to 2016 with female entrepreneurs as the central character. Over the 30-year period, only 11 films about women entrepreneurs were identified – fewer than the number of <a href="https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/steve-jobs-movies-documentaries-to-watch-3786148/">films about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs</a> alone.</p>
<p>From <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092605/">Baby Boom</a> (1987), where Diane Keaton’s character starts a baby food business, to Melissa McCarthy’s brownie empire in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2702724">The Boss</a> (2016), these films overwhelmingly depicted female entrepreneurs as running small-scale kitchen table businesses in female-dominated industries.</p>
<p>These movies told stories of cleaning, as in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2446980/">Joy</a> (2015) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0862846/">Sunshine Cleaning</a> (2008); fashion, as in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2361509/">The Intern</a> (2015); and not-for-profit work, as in the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116313/">First Wives Club</a> (1996).</p>
<p>Businesses depicted typically had low numbers of paid employees. The entrepreneurs were resource-poor, and most often it was a supporting male character who helped the female entrepreneur succeed.</p>
<p>Additionally, the study found a woman starting her own business is seemingly not enough to hold audience attention: all films included a parallel romantic storyline.</p>
<p><strong>The female entrepreneur as role model</strong></p>
<p>Celebrating successful female role models <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487011000353">encourages women</a> to dream big and succeed in male dominated arenas.</p>
<p>Role models provide a source of inspiration and contribute to self-belief. As the quantity of entrepreneurship related media increases, so does the amount of <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11365-006-0018-8.pdf">entrepreneurial activity</a>.</p>
<p>However, negative portrayals of careers may <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-04591-001">prevent</a> people from considering a profession.</p>
<p>The case of Holmes and Theranos is damaging for the <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-14/theranos-misled-investors-and-consumers-who-used-its-blood-test">betrayed</a> customers and investors, but also for the field of entrepreneurship, which only in recent decades has seen its reputation overhauled.</p>
<p>Entrepreneurship was once the <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-brief-history-of-entrepreneurship/9780231173049">domain of racketeers</a>. Over time, it has evolved to be the domain of tech celebrities, socially conscious founders and a vehicle for upward social mobility – but still, too often, a domain of men.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429279836/chapters/10.4324/9780429279836-26">One study</a> investigated how female entrepreneurs are featured on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine. Women were vastly outnumbered by men on the cover, and were often portrayed in a stereotypical female fashion.</p>
<p>Words surrounding images of women tended to be about nurturing, health, beauty and fashion. Wording accompanying images of male entrepreneurs talked of power, innovation and risk taking.</p>
<p>Women were “glamified” in full make-up and focus given to their face, while men were more likely to be standing and set against a corporate colour palette.</p>
<p>How we tell stories of female entrepreneurs matters.</p>
<p>In order to achieve equity in entrepreneurship, we need to acknowledge the role of the media in filling the entrepreneurship pipeline.</p>
<p>Positive depictions of innovative women act as a mirror, showing girls and women what they can achieve. We need more, and better, stories about female entrepreneurs so stories about female innovation aren’t limited to failure and fraud.</p>
<p><em>Written by Bronwyn Eager and Louise Grimmer. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-inventor-tells-a-story-of-a-fraudulent-female-billionaire-where-are-the-films-starring-successful-women-entrepreneurs-145922">The Conversation.</a> </em></p>
