Entrepreneurs help fuel economies and create jobs while bringing new ideas to market. However, it can be challenging to find a woman or minority-owned business in the shrinking world of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. It is also difficult to find venture capitalists who are women or minorities, and the two are probably related. To encourage more entrepreneurs representing a diverse population, you will first have to promote the skills and mindsets necessary.

Destroy the Myth of the “Born Entrepreneur”

The myth that entrepreneurs are born and not cultivated focuses on talents instead of skills. It sometimes has venture capitalists looking for a more narrow set of skills than what the entrepreneurial spirit incorporates. For instance, it takes driven individuals to open a business. Still, if you label assertiveness or competitive spirit as the only components of that trait, you will miss those skilled individuals who honed perseverance and creativity instead. Venture capitalists tend to invest in those whose demographics and skills most closely align with their own, leaving women and minorities more hoops to jump through for investors.

Encourage Skills From a Young Age

When STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, started being taught in public schools to younger students, more women and minorities joined those fields upon graduation. This focus on developing the skills needed for STEM careers, like coding, encouraged a more diverse section of the population towards cyber security, app development, and much more. Encouraging entrepreneurial skills throughout primary and secondary education can similarly boost the number of minority-owned business startups.

Examine Innate Biases

Studies show that businesses run by women perform as well as or better than those run by their male counterparts. Those same studies also show that women-owned companies present a lower risk profile for investors. Those facts should make venture capitalists more likely to invest in a startup run by a woman, but they invest less in female-led businesses and tend to ask women different questions. Venture capitalists who examine innate biases such as how gender or race affect their interviewing process and the questions asked are more likely to encourage entrepreneurs to succeed.

The entrepreneurial spirit is a major driving force of the economy, but venture capitalists fund fewer women and minority-owned business startups. This lack of funding discourages those with the skills and ideas to create companies, jobs, and profits. You can counter this by destroying the “born entrepreneur” myth and encouraging entrepreneurial skills from a young age.