When we talk about race in America, it’s not all that often we have a chance to tout something great, as far as statistics. We have a long way to go to even get close to equality, but in one aspect of life, at least, black women are winning – they’re boss at being, well, the boss.
Starting a business and committing to being self-employed, are tough calls that require enormous leaps of faith. If you’re savvy, if your idea is solid, and if you’ve got a good head for marketing and sales, you’ve got a shot. And in America, women across the board are taking more of those leaps than their male counterparts and landing them successfully!
In the past year, female entrepreneurs have started an average of 1817 new businesses a day – 663,205 new companies a year – and women of color make up 89% of those founders and CEOs. The number started going up around five years ago and hasn’t stopped, meaning that women represent around 42% of the self-owned businesses in the US.
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Increases in educational and economic progress are partially to thank, but Kathy McShane, of the US Small Business Administration’s Office of Women’s Business Ownership, thinks that a societal shift could also be underlying the change.
“Women have been taking control, frankly, for centuries. But now we’re talking about it.”
Even though women are starting more business, and women of color are representing a large portion of those numbers, men still receive the largest bulk of financing for new ventures.
Last year, women were only approved for 2.8% of all venture capital funding for new businesses.
So, one of the biggest hurdles still faced by women of color is amassing the capital to turn their idea into a valid business.
Esosa Ighodara, founder of the social media shopping app CoSign, said as much in an interview with Inc. magazine.
“There’s this notion that we don’t exist. Entrepreneurship is very lonely, and even lonelier in minority community.”
Ighodara attempted to address the dearth of support about the lack of diverse representation in business by creating Black Women Talk Tech, which encourages and supports black women looking to start their own businesses.
According to Natalie Madeira Cofield, the founder of Walker’s Legacy, which is a national network for women of color in business, has her own ideas about what prejudices are at play.
“People invest in people they feel connected to, and the majority of those in power don’t necessarily get a Black woman.”
A study conducted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation backs up her claims, finding that first-time black business owners receive almost three times less overall capital than white-owned businesses and are also three times less likely to be approved for loan requests, regardless of their credit score or net worth.
One of the reasons women of color are flocking to entrepreneurship is that they’re more likely to experience workplace harassment than any other group. 52% of these new business owners worked at corporations prior to opening their own business, and quit because they were in some way dissatisfied with their experience. They’re making their own opportunities because they’re not afforded the same ones, at the same frequency, as their white and/or male counterparts.
Despite all of this, black women are not only choosing the tough road of going out on their own, they’re succeeding, too. Women, it seems, have had enough. Despite the lack of support, the active attempts to keep them down and out and at home, they’re pushing up and through and going around – whatever they have to do to build the lives they want.
So three cheers to all of the women entrepreneurs out there – but especially the black women (and other women of color), because we all know it was at least twice as hard for them to make it.
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