Women have many contacts, but they don't network.” When Christiane Stapp-Osterod says that, the managing director of the Jumpp-Frauenbetriebe start-up contact point is not criticizing the same sex.

Rather, it wants to encourage them to better position themselves professionally and thus economically.

Women rarely used their contacts to enter into partnerships and acquire orders.

"We have to empower women because they often don't see what they could get."

Mechthild Harting

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The 62-year-old Stapp-Osterod has dedicated herself to empowering women for 30 years.

Since 1992 she has been at the head of the association, which was considered revolutionary when it was founded in 1984 and was therefore typical of Frankfurt: the women's companies.

The motto was: "Women create their own jobs", which was an outrageous political thought at the time.

For many it was a declaration of war when women earn their own money, independent of the breadwinner of the family.

"With healthy naivety"

For Stapp-Osterod, who was born in the district of Miltenberg and went to school in Aschaffenburg, the women's movement of the 1970s was a long way off.

But she observed her own family soberly: her mother, a housewife, took care of the entire six-person household - without even enjoying a certain appreciation for it, without power.

Only the father, “he was able to shape his life”.

And Stapp-Osterod wanted that too.

She determinedly began her diploma in pedagogy in Frankfurt.

"I wanted to help." She quickly realized that she wasn't inclined to be a Samaritan.

She wanted to meet people as equals.

Contacts with the women's movement strengthened the ambitions of "wanting to change something".

Her diploma thesis was entitled: "The time is ripe: women are beginning to fall out of character." Stapp-Osterod is not a feminist of the old school, not an ideological fighter.

It was a matter of course for her to have a job and to earn her own money.

"With healthy naivety" she stuck to these goals even when starting her own family.

With success.

Initially, she got into training and further education, headed the relevant staff department of a global company, developed concepts,

This gives a clear indication of what the association, which has been called “Jumpp – your springboard to independence” since 2010 and only attaches the women’s companies for the sake of completeness, has stood for years and where Stapp-Osterod has developed it: to start-up advice with “socio- economic approach".

In other words: Jumpp advises women on becoming self-employed and founding companies, but not just with the view of using market opportunities.

"We pick up the women, see where they stand, what suits each individual." Potential, innovative strength and creativity should be promoted in order to make society more diverse, more equal and thus more sustainable, says Stapp-Osterod.

With this approach, Jumpp is probably unique in Germany.

The team, which now has 16 women, has created countless projects, has been the Hessian coordination center for women and business for years, and organizes the Female Entrepreneurs' Day.

And Stapp-Osterod?

She enjoys the success and yet in the same breath, in her unpretentious, clear way of thinking in an emancipatory way, demands that the start-up scene, for example, does not have to be firmly in the hands of men.

If you want to have more women there, you have to broaden the concept of funding and not only focus on IT start-ups.