The NFL's first female coach has a special message for men
Invest in women.
Jen Welter knows a thing or two about breaking barriers. Earlier this year, the 38-year-old Vero Beach, Fla., native became the
first female coach in the NFL’s 95-year history.
Now that Welter has made her way into the NFL (though her position as an assistant coaching intern with the Arizona Cardinals has since ended), she wants other young women to have the same opportunities. It’s a task she says can’t be accomplished unless men are willing to put some skin in the game, too. On Thursday, Welter addressed hundreds of female entrepreneurs at the United Nations on Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, a global event that celebrates women business owners. She spoke to Yahoo Finance a few days before taking the stage to discuss her ascent in the sports industry and what it will take to make the road easier for the women who come behind her.
“Being in a male-dominated industry, I really had to have those big brothers who welcomed me and lifted me up and gave me resources,” says Welter. When former NFL cornerback and indoor football coach Wendell Davis offered her a job coaching his linebackers last year, Welter initially turned him down. Davis wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Thankfully, he saw something in me before I saw it myself because he told me you need to take this job,” she said.
Before her historic posting, Welter spent more than a decade playing professional women’s football and helped Team USA win gold twice at the International Federation of American Football's Women's World Championship. To pay her way through each season (like many female pro football players, she did not earn a salary), Welter taught aerobics and worked as a personal trainer on the side. Off the field, she earned a Master's degree in sports psychology and a PhD in psychology.
Even with her impressive resume and numerous accolades, Welter says it’s unlikely she could have cracked the NFL’s glass ceiling without support from men in the business.
It was Davis who would later refer Welter to Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians. Arians offered her a job coaching the team’s linebackers during their 2015 pre-season training camp. “[Arians] was willing to bet on me and with his reputation that was huge,” she says. “Without him saying to other coaches ‘this girl is worth it’, they probably wouldn’t have given me that chance.”
Venture capital discrepancies
Women’s Entrepreneurship Day was founded in 2014 by longtime animal rights activist Wendy Diamond. Diamond said she was inspired to create a movement around women entrepreneurs after volunteering with an organization that supplied microloans to women-owned businesses.
“This isn’t just about women supporting women, but men supporting women as well,” Diamond says. “When women earn money, the majority goes toward providing for her family and their education. With that stat alone, everyone in the world, including men, should be supporting women-owned businesses.”
In the business world, men still hold the majority of the wealth, little of which finds its way into the hands of women-led enterprises.
Women own more than one-third of U.S. businesses. And yet, a mere 2.7% of companies that received venture capital funding between 2011 and 2013 had a woman CEO at the helm, according to a study by the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College. The same study found businesses run by all-male teams were more than four times as likely as companies with one woman executive to receive funding from venture capital investors.
Part of this discrepancy can be attributed to the glaring gender imbalance in the VC industry itself. Venture capital firms with women partners are four times more likely to invest in companies with female CEOs (58% vs. 15%), however, only 6% of VC firms have women partners on staff, according to the Babson report.
There’s been a big push in recent years to fix the pipeline between women business leaders and eager investors. There are angel investing networks like Astia that specifically target women-run startups, and the Small Business Association has loan programs dedicated to working with women and minorities (a recent U.S. Senate report found only 4.4% of female-owned businesses are granted conventional small-business loans).
Speaking at Thursday’s event alongside Welter, James Benedict, managing director of Cavendish Global, an investment consulting firm, stressed the importance of mentorship for women looking to grow their businesses.
“I think women overemphasize the social aspect of what they do... I [tell them] to really hit hard with the business metrics. Tell them this is a great investment opportunity and here’s why,” he said. “Then [investors] eventually start focusing on the ‘what’ and not the ‘who.’”
Welter added that women also need to be realistic. So long as women are trying to crack industries historically dominated by men, all of the talent and intellect in the world may not be enough to tackle the implicit bias some people have against ambitious women. She came into the NFL with a PhD, 14 years of experience and two gold medals, and even that still wasn’t enough to silence some determined to doubt her abilities.
“I’ve had people who didn’t love me as a coach and wouldn't support it,” she says. “In those times you have to look for people who do support you and do believe in you.”
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Mandi Woodruff is a reporter for Yahoo Finance and host of Brown Ambition, a weekly podcast about career and finance. Follow her on Tumblr or Facebook.
