Celebrating Women’s History Month - March
March is Women’s History Month and I hope this article will inspire Women as well as the Men who wish to encourage Women in their lives.
Women have been the cornerstone of many well established businesses throughout time. In US history’s early settlement era Taverns and Brothels were women owned. The beginning of the 20th century also challenged women faced with managing factories that their father’s or husbands left behind while struggling to be respected as a responsible business owner in this male dominated arena. Over the last hundred years, these pioneering women endured the test of time which brought on huge change for which many Gen Y and Millennial women can be thankful for. Researchers believe these changes occurred due to; increasing acceptance of women in the work place, prominence and movement into a vast assortment of enterprises and the role of technology making entrepreneurship more accessible and affordable.
An Entreprenuers.com article on Women in History provides a detailed timeline worth checking out, here are a few highlights: Women entrepreneurs helped to rebuild the economy by increasing the number of women-owned businesses from 600,000 in 1945 to nearly one million by 1950, after the Great Depression.
During the 1980s and 1990s, women who wanted to start a business or help it to grow got a major boost from the explosion in the number of new opportunities to network with other successful women entrepreneurs and learn about access to federal programs and resources. Organizations sprang up everywhere, such as the Women’s Business Development Center (1986) an organization still operating today, which hosts educational seminars, assists with government programs, financing and training opportunities. In 1988(ironically the year I got my first real job right out of college) , a milestone was reached when Congress passed The Women’s Business Ownership Act, ending discrimination in lending, eliminated state laws that required married women to have a husband’s signature for all loans and gave women-owned businesses a chance to compete for lucrative government contracts. Additionally, in 1989, President George H.W. Bush appointed Susan Engeleiter as the first woman to head the Small Business Administration, proof that woman entrepreneurs were finally an accepted part of the mainstream economy.
Here are a few fun facts found in a Business News Daily article by Shannon Gausepohl (August 2016), a list of 10 successful businesses that were started by inspiring female entrepreneurs. See how many you recognize.
1. Bark & Co
2. SlideShare
3. Birchbox
4. Cisco
5. Flickr
6. Liquid Paper*
7. The Body Shop
8. Ruth’s Chris Steak House
9. Build-A-Bear Workshop
10. Proactiv
*This one intrigued me, in 1950 Executive secretary Bette Nesmith Graham used white water-based tempura paint and a thin paintbrush to cover her typing errors, in 1956 she patented the idea and in 1979 sold the business Liquid Paper, and yes, she was the mother of Mike Nesmith of The Monkees.
The last century of women’s entrepreneurship is not simply a tale of triumph or of an incomplete revolution. It is a story of risks and rewards, of women who had an idea and believed in the possibilities; battled obstacles, gender bias and forged networks to make their dreams a reality. Sadly, not all of them made it and not all of those who did saw their ventures become major corporations in existence today.
The next century does have even brighter promise for women’s entrepreneurship. New technologies emerge daily to make business ownership more affordable, easier to manage and multitask while new financing opportunities are increasingly available. Experts predict that by 2018, women’s businesses will create more than half of the new small business jobs and a third of the nation’s total new jobs. Beyond that, anything is possible!
Sources:
http://entrepreneurs.nwhm.org/#/introduction/1
Throughout history Women haven’t had it easy which makes the success of any women owned business a treasure. Statistics on women in positions of power are growing but are still a very small percentage. According to the latest survey by Catalyst, a nonprofit that tracks gender parity in the workplace, women occupy a only 4% of corner offices at S&P 500 companies. And they hold a meer 25% of executive or senior-level jobs in those same firms. Since 2005, the number of women who are world leaders—presidents or heads of state—had more than doubled by 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. I discovered a great Forbes article, identifying a list of top 10 women of influence. The researchers used Four metrics: money (either net worth, company revenues, or GDP); media presence; spheres of influence; and impact, analyzed both within the context of each woman’s field (media, technology, business, philanthropy, politics, and finance) and outside of it. Here are the 2016 top 10 Women of influence are: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, number one for six years running, continues to head the list, followed close behind, again, by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, No. 2; Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen; philanthropist Melinda Gates; and General Motors CEO Mary Barra. International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde retains her spot at No. 6, followed by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. Meg Whitman, the CEO of HP , and Ana Patricia Botín, the chair of Banco Santander, ascend to numbers 9 and 10, respectively.