Fundamentally women are a more powerful presence in the workplace than ever as entrepreneurs, scientists, inventors, technicians and corporate leaders. Why then a business issue focused on women in business when women are thriving, surviving and starting businesses every day?
When more than 9.1 million firms in this country are owned by women, employing nearly 7.9 million people and generating $1.4 trillion in sales as of 2014.
When women-owned firms account for 30 percent of all privately held firms and contribute 14 percent of employment and 11 percent of revenues. When one in five firms with revenue of $1 million or more is woman-owned.
Even more impressive: on average over 1997–2014 period, there has been a net increase of 591 women-owned firms each day—and 1,288 per day over the past year. When between 1997 and 2014, the number of women-owned firms grew at 1½ times the national average. Revenue and employment growth among women-owned firms tops that of all other firms—except the largest, publicly traded corporations.
Here’s the caveat: while Oregon has an estimated 126,600 women-owned firms that employ 102,700 workers collecting roughly $17.7 billion in revenue, the increase in the number of women-owned firms in Oregon falls well below national norms. Oregon ranks 26th in terms of the fastest growth of the number of women-owned firms, at 57.2 percent, over the last 18 years. The figure trails the national average, which came in this year at 74 percent. The state ranks 33rd in terms of the growth of the firms’ revenue, which tallied 71.5 percent between 1997 and 2015.
Although women make up the majority of registered voters in the U.S. there are only 84 female representatives, or 19.3 percent of the House of Representatives. Some states – Alaska, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Vermont— have never elected a women to the House. A similar statistic rests in the Senate with 20 women currently serving.
The number of women in the corporate world aren’t so impressive, but the profits with women onboard tell a different story.
Studies show that companies with women in top roles earn higher returns, share prices and organizational-health scores than those with all-male leadership. Yet despite mounting evidence that executive diversity is associated with better performance, the glass ceiling has stayed mostly intact: worldwide, women still hold less than a quarter of senior management positions and solutions such as boardroom quotas have so far failed to change the overall number of female executives.
According to the Center for American Progress (CAP), it will take until 2085 for women to reach parity with men in leadership roles in our country. Women hold just 16.9 percent of Fortune 500 board seats with no significant improvement in the last few years.
When business leaders debate measures to address gender inequality, they might consider its relationship to that all-important marketplace metric: economic growth.
The high-tech industry—in which job growth has been three times faster than in the rest of the private sector over the past decade — boasts the most women on a list of the 200 highest-paid chief executives. Overall, top jobs in Silicon Valley still skew toward men, but tech companies seem to have removed some of the barriers for women at the highest level. Dominic King, of the consultancy Grant Thornton, attributes this trend to the industry’s freedom from the rigidity of more-traditional sectors, like energy and agriculture.
There may be a lot of complicated reasons why women are not excelling at getting top leadership roles including staying out of the workforce to have a family, lack of interest and fear of imposing on lifestyle, the unwillingness to play corporate games…and in some cases just plain discrimination.
But according Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, women undermine their own cause and tend more than men to view their success as fraudulent. “They give in too quickly to the idea that you can’t have both a career and a family, they fail to take risks they need to take, they are afraid to demand that their husbands do their fair share and they don’t know how to cultivate useful relationships with their superiors.”
Some of those sentiments are just plain annoying if you’re a women business entrepreneur who did just the opposite.
We can, however, be joyful in following the money that comes with leadership with the number of wealthy women in the U.S. growing twice as fast as the number of wealthy men and 60 percent of high-net-worth women earning their own fortunes. Women represent more than 40 percent of all Americans with gross investable assets above $600,000. 45 percent of American millionaires are women and 48 percent of estates worth more than $5 million are controlled by women, compared with 35 percent controlled by men. Some estimate that by 2030, women will control as much as two-thirds of the nation’s wealth.
We can only hope that one day they’ll be no reason to single women out as a specific category. But the current reality is that there are still discrepancies in compensation between men and women performing equal work, that women’s healthcare is a political issue (really?), the percentage of senior-management positions held by women in G7 countries has remained essentially unchanged over the past decade and at 82 percent Congress is a fractured male-dominated institution.
