This paper provides a foundation for the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) to develop and launch a major initiative targeted at helping women achieve high levels of business growth. NWBC is the single government organization that focuses exclusively on ensuring that this nation’s economy realizes the full potential of one of its fastest-growing segments – women-owned businesses. Integral to achieving this mission is to be a catalyst for women-owned businesses creating jobs and generating revenue.
Resource Category: Microbusiness
Job Creation through Entrepreneurship
Is microenterprise development an effective job creation strategy during a recession? Key findings on women who entered employment, self-employment, providing jobs for others, job retention and creation, and full-time jobs.
Intuit 2020 Trends Report
With a new decade upon us, a range of demographic, economic, social, and technological shifts are changing the way we live and operate around the world. The Intuit 2020 report looks at the significant trends and forces that are affecting consumers and small businesses, and those who serve them, over the next decade.
Capital Availability in Inner Cities
In this paper, we examine a key driver of business success—access to financial capital—and discuss current and potential roles of federal policy in ensuring access to capital for inner-city businesses. Access to capital has historically been a problem in low-to-moderate income (LMI) areas, illustrated most extremely in so-called “redlining,” a term coined in the 1960s to describe the practice of refusing to make loans or write insurance policies based on neighborhood characteristics, rather than merits of would-be borrowers. While this practice is illegal, the persistence of the “capital gap” has become a contentious issue among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Some believe that major regulatory efforts focused on improving credit access in LMI areas, such as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), have rendered the capital gap a problem of the past. Others believe that despite significant improvements, large barriers continue to exist, creating a shortage of capital for even investment-worthy inner city businesses. Resolving this debate is critical for designing appropriate public and private sector responses to the anemic economic performance in inner cities.
Policy Priorities of Women Business Owners
On June 16, 2010, a summit of women business owners was held in Salem, Massachusetts, at the historic Hawthorne Hotel. Since the earliest Colonial times, Salem has been a major commercial center in a regional economy based on industries as varied as international maritime spice trade and textile manufacturing. Now, as the Greater Boston/North Shore region builds a twenty-first-century economy based on tourism, technology, and creativity, women entrepreneurs have the opportunity to play a key role. At this summit, women business owners on Boston’s North Shore shared their priorities, challenges, and concerns to help the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) to articulate policy recommendations for the consideration of the President, Congress, and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).
Microenterprises in the Economy
A Senate Office of Research report concerning the microenterprise sector in California, the number of microenterprises in California, the number of persons employed and jobs created by them, share of workforce in urban and rural counties, and changes in state/federal tax revenues due to the sector.
Growing Through Entrepreneurship
This IMPAQ evaluation of Project GATE addresses the following questions:
Could Project GATE be replicated?
Was Project GATE effective in increasing business ownership, employment, and self-sufficiency?
Latina Entrepreneur SBE
This paper compares earnings of Latina entrepreneurs to both Latina wage/salary workers and to self-employed female non-Hispanic whites. Latina entrepreneurs are observed to have lower mean earnings than both white female entrepreneurs and Latina employees. However, our findings indicate that Latina entrepreneurs often do well, once differences in mean observable characteristics, such as education, are taken into account.
Impact of Women-Owned Businesses
For the first time, the Center for Women’s Business Research has utilized a methodology to measure the economic impact of the estimated 8 million U.S. businesses currently majority women-owned. Today, women-owned firms have an economic impact of $3 trillion annually that translates into the creation and/or maintenance of more than 23 million jobs – 16 percent of all U.S. jobs! These jobs not only sustain the individual worker but contribute to the economic security of their families, the economic vitality of their communities and the nation.
Priorities and Challenges of Women Business Owners
To further its role of advising the President, Congress and the U.S. Small Business Administration on issues related to women’s business ownership, the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) held a series of six town hall meetings with women business owners around the country throughout 2007 and 2008. The objective of the meetings was to hear from women business owners about their views on national-level policy issues in order to inform the Council’s future recommendations to government leaders.