“101 Women with the Prime Minister” competition: boosting women entrepreneurship!

10 January 2024 Business

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“Women entrepreneurs are our country’s strong suit.” So observed the French Prime Minister and the Minister in charge of Gender Equality while designing and launching “101 Femmes de Matignon”, a competition aiming at shedding light over a woman entrepreneur in each French department. This contest is part of “Toutes et Tous Egaux” (All Equal), a French government plan presented in March 2023 leveraging support to women who create businesses.

“101 Femmes de Matignon” (101 Women with the Prime Minister) is a competition jointly organised by Bpifrance (an investment public bank) and the French Prime Minister to shed the light over about a hundred women entrepreneurs in France (one woman in each French département, rough equivalent to a county) to encourage them to start businesses and present various business mechanisms available in France to help them.

Becoming an ambassador of entrepreneurship

“Boost your business creation project and become an ambassador of entrepreneurship in your department, by applying to the “101 Femmes de Matignon” contest! ”. This is the invitation of the website dedicated to the competition to “encourage careers in business and support innovation and empowerment”, which are “challenges to face to boost business creation by women”.

This operation was first created to encourage women to create businesses, but it also highlights all the mechanisms available in France, such as the Cap Créa community. This community “expands the entrepreneurship spirit and the importance of being supported to succeed in your business project” and benefits from 3,000 implementations in France, which already led to 150,000 project creators being supported and the creation of 80,000. As the website explains, support networks members of Cap Créa, “which are rich in their specificities and expertise (awareness-raising, funding, rebound, pick-up, boosting)” have the means to “boost access to entrepreneurship of all women and men for the economy, the employment, and to answer the main social and environmental challenges of business creation”.

Women are under-represented in business creation

The French ministry in charge of gender equality underlined that today in France, “only 32% of French companies are led by a woman”. And the ministry adds that “gaps are even wider in start-ups, with only 4% funded by women”. French women entrepreneurs thus lack “visibility and support in the materialization of their project”.

According to the ministry, to bring more gender equality among business CEOs, it is now necessary to “raise awareness about the existing mechanisms and experiences of the women who started their business adventure to inspire new careers”. This is why, since 2012, the ministry in charge of gender equality is steering a framework agreement in favour of entrepreneurship made by women with Bpifrance.

Simple requirements to compete

The requirements of this contest, defined in this agreement, are very simple. To participate, you must obviously be a woman over 18 and:

having been or being helped by an entity supporting business creation/take-over;
having a project of business creation/take-over in France with articles of association not already filed at the registration deadline, or being “majority director of a company in France with articles of association submitted less than one year ago compared with the contest deadline”.

The juries of the contest will be led by regional directors of women’s rights and regional managers of Bpdifrance, and include partners of the contest. They will appoint one laureate per department and choose a “coup de coeur” (breakthrough entrepreneur) by region.

After the contest, winner entrepreneurs will benefit from tailor-made support covering all their needs, such as:

contact with all the competition’s partners, including financial partners, for training, mentoring, financial engineering support and networking;
access to a launch bootcamp run by all the partners, in particular the “Coq Créa Community, emblem of the entrepreneurs supported by the Cap Créa community”.