Web data analysis: Why women start up - motives and challenges

Germans searched for work-life balance more than 13,600 times per month on average in 2018, an increase of 24 percent compared to 2015, according to an analysis of search queries on Google by SEMrush. Women were also asked about their startup challenges and motivations. "According to Startup Monitor, the proportion of female founders in Germany is rising steadily, but relatively slowly. We would not reach parity between male and female founders like this until the 22nd century," says Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush. "That's why we analyzed search queries to find out which gender-specific startup hurdles and motives Germans are particularly concerned with."
 
According to the SEMrush analysis, the topics of family and career and disadvantage in the workplace play a particularly central role for searchers: Search queries on "reconciling family and career" have doubled since 2015. For Lisa Jaspers, founder of Folkdays.de, this was a personal founding motivation: "I couldn't imagine starting a family in my salaried job as a consultant. Unfortunately, most corporate structures are not particularly family-friendly. Personally, I wanted more freedom to organize my working hours."
 
In addition, "gender pay gap" was searched for more than 4,300 times a month on average last year. The so-called glass ceiling also concerns Germans - 118 percent more often than in 2015, users searched for "glass ceiling women" in 2018. Stefanie Treiber, founder of Industriestil-deluxe.de, appeals to the business world: "We still live in a male-dominated business world, in which women are not trusted to do the same, or women do not trust themselves to do the same. Which is a pity, because in over ten years of independence I have made the experience that male colleagues often take the mouth too full, whereas women often work more thoughtfully, more conscientiously and above all more sustainably in projects."

The analysis of search queries on Google can optimally complement the representative survey results on gender-specific motives and hurdles for founding a company. It is therefore well worth taking a look at what keywords and questions users ultimately search for on their own initiative on the Internet and comparing these results. The analysis of web data allows conclusions to be drawn about which topics and issues are gaining or losing social relevance. This makes it possible to identify clear trends.