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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 October 27, 1997. Female entrepreneurs enjoy new cloutBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to the Post and Courier Small business is now the most rapidly growing segment in the American economy. Within entrepreneurship, the fastest growing group is women owned businesses. Dun and Bradstreet Information Services report that women now own more than 7.7 million firms. These employ more people in the United States than the Fortune 500 companies do worldwide - to be precise, one third more employees. If the trends continue, according to a congressional committee, by the year 2000, women will own nearly half of all American businesses. The appearance of large numbers of female entrepreneurs in the economy is something new. Historically confined to the private sphere of domesticity and with limited access to capital, business or technical education, and experience, until recently, when women went to work they entered organizations. So many in fact that by the 1980s, workforce demographics had been irrevocably altered. In varying degrees, most companies accommodated to the change. Today, nearly all are aware that, according to demographic projections, in the coming decades they will not be able to prosper or perhaps even survive without recruiting and promoting women managers. But changing corporate cultures has been difficult. While it is clear that women are achieving greater upward mobility, breaking into the highest ranks is extremely rare. Top management and the corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies remain predominately male. According to the New York non-profit women's research group Catalyst, today women constitute only two percent of corporate America's top earners. Few sit on the boards of directors of the largest corporations. Faced with limited advancement opportunities and weary of being sidetracked, a number of talented and capable women grew disillusioned with corporate life and politics and left. The frustration became so widespread and noticeable that when Ann Morrison, Randall White, and Ellen Van Velsor titled their 1977 book Breaking The Glass Ceiling, the phrase stuck. Discrimination also played a role in corporate exits. One 1990 study reports that 46 percent of the female professionals surveyed reported that they experienced discrimination at work. Over the past 20 years women have started businesses at more than twice the rate of men. Corporate exit into entrepreneurship has been one way to move beyond the glass ceiling. Well trained as a result of their management experience in large organizations, these female entrepreneurs now make formidable competitors. There is a long list of intriguing questions. Ideas about what we call "typically entrepreneurial" values are based on studies of male entrepreneurs, not women. Who are these new women entrepreneurs? Did they elect to leave corporate life because they always intend to run their own businesses? Or did they begin as organizational women, thinking ahead to building careers in the companies or industries before changing their minds? Before entrepreneurship, what corporate positions did hold? Whey they left, were they pulled by an internal drive for challenge and the opportunity to take control or pushed by unhappy organizational climates? Did concerns that time for child-bearing and child-rearing were running out play any role in decisions? Questions related to the companies these women have founded are equally interesting. Do they replicate the values and practices of the older organizational climates or are they different? Do women entrepreneurs manage or lead in ways different from men? Do these women consider themselves successful? Do they measure success in new ways? Future columns on female entrepreneurs will examine these and many other questions. Next: Women Entrepreneurs - Profiles of the Successful. For Questions/Comments about this site, contact moored@citadel.edu. Site designed by Jackye Cocoros. |