Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

How CWEL is Closing the Gender Gap

The Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL) at Babson College created the Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab to empower women to launch big, bold companies, and to close the gender gap by increasing the pipeline of women founders into the greater entrepreneurial ecosystem. As the Lab graduated its second class of powerful start-up entrepreneurs this April, it is already moving the needle – both here at Babson and beyond:

Babson’s Rocket Pitch: WINners are required to pitch in Babons’s annual rocket pitch competition. Since the founding of the Lab women’s participation has increased from 22% to 36%.

Babson’s B.E.T.A. Challenge: In this year’s BETA challenge, all three of the graduate finalists were women; two of those were WIN LAB participants and the winner of the $20,000 cash prize was WIN Lab’s very own Abby Speicher, Founder and CEO of DARTdrones.

The John E. and Alice L. Butler Venture Accelerator: Before the WIN Lab, this very competitive summer program included at most two or three women founders in its pool of 15 companies. This year nine out of the 15 teams selected are led by women, including five graduates from this year’s WIN Lab!

External Ecosystem: We are proud to announce that this year’s WIN Lab Women on Main Fellow Marlena Carter-Diaz won the Center for Women and Enterprise’s Women Business Leaders Conference Pitch Competition for her business Care Management Temporary Staff Agency.

Last but not least, the WIN Lab was a finalist in this year’s prestigious Rosoff Awards, for its partnership with the Mayor’s Office Women on Main Initiative.