Female business owners are primed to take over the world

Rolling back the calendar to 1948, only one-third of American women worked outside the home compared to 87 percent of men. As the decades rolled by, the gap has steadily narrowed as men's employment rates declined and laboring women increased. In 2019, men had dropped to 69.2 percent and women have raised to 57.4 percent. There are 12.3 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. and over the last 20 years, the number of female entrepreneurs has grown by 114 percent. When it comes to micro-businesses, eight percent more women own them than men (90.3 percent versus 82.3 percent). When it comes to education, women have dominated American college enrollment since 2000. In recent years, American institutions have awarded 57 percent of bachelor's degrees to women. When it comes to advanced degrees, women collected 53 percent. Yes, our ladies are generally more educated than our men. This is one of the clues to the priming as suggested by the title. On the downside, the U.S. Census Bureau states that women are still earning less than men, about 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. But this is significantly better than back in 1980 when women ages 25 to 34 earned just 33 cents. The reasons for the unequal pay include more men in higher-paid industries (and women in lower-paid industries), vertical segregation with less women in senior positions, women's overall paid working hours, barriers to entry and ineffective equal-pay legislation. Publicly-traded companies are feeling a lot of pressure by shareholders to publish diversity and equality figures and legislatures are still working on ways to make gender pay fairer. The U.S. Census Bureau shows that younger women, while still behind the pay curve, do not have nearly the gap that older women have. The older a woman gets, the wider the gap grows. On average over the various age ranges, it's about 30-percent less. While the fast growth in female employment and education is slowing, the next huge opportunity for massive growth is female entrepreneurship! Women are currently underrepresented in high-growth entrepreneurship, but over the past decade, there has been a steady rise in female entrepreneurship, resulting in a 68-percent growth. What's really impressive is that female-owned companies grow by 84 percent compared to male-owned companies, which only grow by 78 percent. Because gender bias is still a real thing, more than 35 percent of female entrepreneurs have experienced gender bias directly. Women-owned businesses receive five-percent less funding than men. It has been hard to find solid funding support for female entrepreneurs. But there has recently been a noticeable increase in funding opportunities for them. For example, facts about women in business show that the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) recently allocated $49.3 million to support small business ventures owned by women. Goldman Sachs launched an investment fund worth half a billion in private, late-stage, women-founded, women-owned or women-led companies. Even though women own about one-third of all businesses, they only own 16 percent of businesses that employ others. When it comes to high-growth companies, female founders usually account for less than 10 percent in any given business segment. These numbers sound bad…OK, they are bad. However, they are also the reason we expect to see significant growth soon. When you put the above puzzle pieces together, the growing strength of working women and the glut of highly-educated women, it seems clear that the future growth of entrepreneurship is absolutely in the hands of women. Recent studies suggest that women entrepreneurs are making gains in fields previously dominated by men but there is still a significant gap in fields such as information technology, manufacturing, construction and transportation. These gaps are important to understand because these industries provide fertile ground for both revenue generation and employment opportunities. This gap has sparked many federal, state and local programs that target women who are primed to launch their own businesses or to boost their existing businesses into higher growth. Why is the government so interested in the huge potential growth of female-owned businesses? Because it is a great way to boost our local and regional economies! Studies have shown that female potential business owners struggle in two key areas. The first is that they lack mentors and advisers to help guide and motivate them into successful business ownership. Incubators, startup environments and purposeful coaching are a great source of resolution to this problem. The second, as discussed in sections above, is that they struggle more than males in obtaining outside funding sources. Both of these situations are fixable, especially if we encourage governments at all levels to join with the business community to help fill these gaps. It will pay off for our communities! R. Scott Alvord, MBA-MCA, BSCS. Scott is an award-winning business owner and CEO of Advanced Development Concepts, LLC. He can be reached at www.ADCBiz.com or 916-782-4272.