Insurance industry asked to support women entrepreneurs

Lahore: Central leader of the Businessman Panel and former vice president FPCCI Khurram Sayeed on Thursday said insurance industry should support women entrepreneurs. Trend of insuring male members of the family should be changed as putting homemakers and women entrepreneurs to risks amounts to discrimination, he said. Like other sectors, insurance industry is excessively focused on males while women are ignored which is unreasonable, he said while talking to a delegation of businesswomen.

Khurram Sayeed said that we should not ignore welfare of women while insurance industry should introduce tailor-made solutions for domestic and business women. Women should be enabled to take care of her family and business in times of crisis; they deserve stability and certainty which is possible if they have the opportunity to transfer any loss, he added.

Women face a series of problems as soon as they decide jump into entrepreneurship that  include issues associating to family, society, traditions, customs, values, ethics, motherhood, insecurity, abuse etc. A male may not require approval of family to start a business while women have to seek many approvals including that from head of family. Women in rural areas have to suffer more as they face extra resistance from men and they are seen with suspicious eyes which put a break to their growth, he observed. We should stop seeing entrepreneurship as a right given only to the male members of society, he said, adding that attachment to family and domestic as well as other burdens take away lots of their time and energy, which make it difficult run an enterprise successfully. Male chauvinism is still the order of the day, women are not treated equal to men, system keeps them rear seat, he added.

Many women remain in dark about the development of new technology, new methods of production, marketing etc which can help them to flourish. Bankers, creditors and financial institutes ignore assistance to women on different unfounded grounds, said Sayeed, adding that women face exploitation by middlemen because of limited ability of marketing, distribution and money collection.