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The following article was published in the Charleston Post & Courier's Business Major, a featured monthly column in the Business Review Section on November 27, 2000. Women Entrepreneurs in Global TransitionBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to The Post and Courier Business Major Business ownership has clearly emerged as an important career alternative for women worldwide and the United States is the pacesetter. The U.S. Small Business Administration continues to forecast that female entrepreneurs will head half of all U.S. businesses by 2002 and that businesses headed by Afro-American women will represent the fastest growing minority sector. Recent figures from the National Foundation for Women Business Owners show that, in the United States, over the past 12 years, the number of women-owned businesses has doubled to more than 9.1 million and now constitutes 38% of all firms. These financially sound and stable businesses show success rates equivalent to men and generate $3.6 trillion in sales yearly. One in eight of these businesses (13 percent) are owned by a woman of color. According to recent studies published in the United Kingdom, female entrepreneurs are now founding almost a third of all the new businesses. Canadian women, who in recent years have been opening firms at rates equivalent to men, today own or operate 30 percent of all businesses and provide 1.7 million jobs. Across Europe, according to the Fourth Annual Report of The European Observatory for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, women now account for 30 percent of the new enterprises or business registration. In Australia, Canada and Germany, the percentages of women-owned businesses approach U.S. figures. In the past decade, in the United States and the West, meaning those countries that in the days of the Cold War used to be called the "Free World," three simultaneous changes have been fundamentally important. The reduction in trade and financial barriers to the flow of goods and capital has created a global economy. Advances in computer and electronic technologies along with their incorporation into "older" mechanical and electrical production systems have lowered the cost of goods and services by raising worker productivity. Corporate restructuring and introduction of knowledge technologies have altered the social structure of organizations making them smarter, flatter, and more adaptable. Combined, these changes are putting an end to old notions of lifetime organizational employment. Knowing it is unlikely they will spend their lives with one employer, workers are beginning to understand they must manage their careers to prosper or even survive. Today's employee changes companies, jobs, and fields of work. They increasingly focus on portable skills and knowledge; education, training and on-the-job learning; networking and contacts; and keeping up. It is within this context that entrepreneurship becomes a more viable option for career enhancement. In the former Communist bloc and other countries where totalitarian governments and command economic systems have given way, an even more fundamental change has taken place. The world has seen the spread of democratic political institutions and the drive to acquire market-driven economic systems similar to those in the West to match their success. In these areas of the world, the changes have been even more dramatic, as studies completed between 1997 and 1999 show. In Poland's recently established enterprise culture, women are opening and operating businesses from motivational and personal characteristics similar to both their Polish male counterparts and those of Western capitalist entrepreneurs. In Hungary, women head two out of every five enterprises that have been established since 1990, an increase of 29.3 percent compared to the previous decade. In Asia, women are starting businesses for the same reasons found in the West: autonomy, flexibility, money and profits. According to recent estimates, women-owned firms now number between one-fourth and one-third of all businesses worldwide. The career characteristics of these female entrepreneurs are strikingly similar. In Hungary, female entrepreneurs report a higher level of educational achievement than the average woman worker. Polish female business owners demonstrate better communication and human resource management skills than male entrepreneurs. Among Israeli women business owners, profitability is highly correlated with previous business experience and networking. In Singapore, where nearly one-third of successful business owners reported no previous work experience, business success appears related to skill in overcoming social obstacles that previously restricted the advancement of women. Comparative studies of both male and female entrepreneurs in the economically most advanced nations suggest they open businesses for many of the same reasons: job freedom and flexibility, independence, personal development, and approval, along with making money. In Poland, women's entry into entrepreneurship centers on having control over one's life, ending problems of dissatisfaction inherent in working for someone else, and reaping greater financial rewards. In Asia, two-thirds (66 percent) of female entrepreneurs in one study were motivated primarily by the desire for autonomy and the freedom and flexibility offered in running one's own business. Where differences in reasons and motivations for setting up a business do exist, as in Turkey, the reasons have been attributed to the country's social structure. In some areas of the world the increase in female entrepreneurship is also being driven by more pressing economic circumstances. In Russia's collapsed economy, and under adverse conditions, millions of women have chosen micro-entrepreneurship as their way of economic survival. There are also similarities in the difficulties women experience in obtaining the necessary financing to begin a business. An impressive study of American women business owners notes that their firms tend to be significantly smaller and newer than businesses owned by men. This, not gender, effects their ability to get and use external financing because banks and other lenders prefer larger firms and longevity, and base loans and finance rates on these factors. Research referenced in this article has been taken from a forthcoming chapter on women's career transitions I have just completed for a co-edited book to be released in 2001 by Blackwell Publishers Limited, United Kingdom. For Questions/Comments about this site, contact dot.moore@comcast.net. Site designed by Jackye Cocoros. |