Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, released a report titled: “Tackling the Gender Gap: What Women Entrepreneurs Need to Thrive.” This timely study draws on interviews with 14 female entrepreneurs, who detail the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them, to highlight current initiatives and provide recommendations to eliminate the unique barriers confronting women-owned small businesses.
Archives: Resources
2016 Microbusinesses Credit Survey
This report is one in a series based on the findings of the 2016 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national collaboration of the Community Development Offices of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. As a supplement to the Report on Employer Firms released in April 2017, this Report on Microbusinesses details findings on the financing experiences and outcomes of the smallest firms in the United States, including the self-employed.
2016 Women-Owned Firms Credit Survey
This report uses a unique dataset to examine the experiences of women-owned small employer firms, especially as compared to their men-owned peers. Small employer firms have traditionally played an important role in U.S. job creation,8 and women-owned firms are an emerging share of the sector. Understanding the opportunities and challenges facing this growing segment of women-owned employers can provide insight into future economic contributions of the sector overall.
Peer Learning Community Programs
For the past decade, Catherine Marshall has helped foundations, collaboratives, and associations design and launch their own Peer Learning Community Programs tailored to their constituents. This document is her effort to share what she learned works, and doesn’t work, with this method and to provide a practical program model as a place to start.
2016 Minority-Owned Firms Credit Survey
This report is the third in a series of reports based on the 2016 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national collaboration of the Community Development Offices of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. As a key financial regulator and economic policymaker, the Federal Reserve System plays an important role in ensuring fair access to credit and promoting economic growth for the well-being of all Americans. Small businesses are an important component of economic success and strong communities; they are responsible for 48% of private sector employees nationwide, are important drivers of local and regional economic growth, and are an important source of household wealth. A healthy small business environment depends on an array of factors, not least of which is the ability to access funds for starting up, scaling up, or maintaining operations. However, as a growing number of studies document, access to funds—whether debt, equity, or personal resources— can vary across race and ethnicity even when business owners are similar in other respects such as business performance and credit risk.
Disparities in Small Business Lending
A study examining disparities in small business lending conducted by the Woodstock Institute found that Fresno minority businesses are losing out in capital and turning to merchant cash advances. (Yikes!) Access Capital, a CAMEO member, is trying to refinance some of those loans.
Veteran Women & Business
This report develops a profile of the veteran women business owner through the presentation of business and business owner characteristics from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2007 and 2012 Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons and 2015 Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs. It is not meant to be all inclusive but, rather, to highlight the current landscape of veteran women-owned firms based off of publicly available data.
Small Business Owners Want Fair Taxes
The poll, conducted for Small Business Majority by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, found small business owners are generally optimistic about economic conditions for small businesses and want tax reform that levels the playing field for their small business. The poll was an online survey of 500 small business owners conducted between September 29 and October 4, 2017.
Freelancing in America: 2017
The fourth annual Freelancing in America study shows what many freelancers know intuitively: The freelance workforce is growing rapidly and adapting quickly in a fast-changing economy. The Freelancers Union projects that independent workers will be a majority of the U.S. workforce in just a decade.
Necessity & Women’s Entrepreneurship
The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) released “Necessity as a Driver of Women’s Entrepreneurship” this week. The report examines whether and how women turn to entrepreneurship to address potential market failures that limit their ability to attain or maintain economic self-sufficiency, or as an avenue to overcome flexibility bias and potential stigma in balancing work-life conflict assumed in traditional gendered roles and social norms.