The Wall Street Journal Women in the Economy Task Force
I’ve been eagerly awaiting yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ever since our Task Force meeting ended last week. The sessions were stellar and I’m grateful to the WSJ for convening and facilitating a very high level of discussion focused on actionable steps.
This blog isn’t a “but” – it’s a pondering. I’m obviously a supporter of asking exactly the kind of questions we identified and tried to answer last week. The challenge is the fit for women who own their own businesses. The meetings were organized along two main theme – industry groups and career stages. Entrepreneurship crosses all industries and all career stages. And indeed, many, if not most, of the of the topics identified in the industry and career stage discussions are highly relevant to women business owners.
But (oops), there are also other issues that pertain to this group that are different than trying to fit into someone else’s corporation. We had a very intense exchange in the entrepreneurship breakout session and came out with the recommendations reported yesterday:
1) Rosie the start-up – this one was really about entrepreneurship education at all levels of education (with Rosie the “America’s Army) for entrepreneurship
2) Make the SBA a cabinet level position, review definitions, and collect more data
3) Tax Credits for job creation (and we do know that this would need to be for more than women-owned businesses”
3) Encourage women investors – in businesses, not just the market.
These recommendations were voted upon by the group at the end of our discussion. The discussion started with a set of 30 word “fire-starter” proposals that I was asked to develop just to get things going. Basically the assignment was to dream about the three things that would make the biggest difference to advance women business owners and their businesses. I started from the premise of the old adage about the definition of insanity – you can’t expect different outcomes from the same old inputs and processes.
Here are our firestarters:
- Change the legislative default
- Most women-owned businesses stay small. Require that legislation be drafted from the perspective of small business rather than large so as to provide a regulatory, tax, and technical assistance environment that supports growth.
- Create innovative funding mechanisms
- Convene a team from various size businesses and a range of current and potential capital providers to design (with implementation plan) strikingly new methods for women to access start-up and growth capital.
- Advance knowledge on the entrepreneurial economy
- Create a strike team of experts to provide a high-level training for corporate leaders, legislators, and reporters on the true nature of women’s entrepreneurship – building from stats into motivations, definitions of success, and the variety of pathways.
When we combined the firestarters, the discussion content both within the entrepreneurship group and across the other sessions, and the final recommendations, my friend Nancy Carter (www.catalyst.org) and I (www.womensbusinessresearch.org) concluded that we have a lot of work to do. There is still a huge disconnect between how decision makers (corporate and policy) and media view the U.S. economy (which is about entrepreneurship), particularly around the role of women. There is so much being done around the world advancing women’s entrepreneurship for all types of women and all types of businesses. I very much look forward to continuing the discussion and the work of the Task Force with hopefully great things to report out next year.
Patricia Greene
President’s Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship
P.S. Loved the Task Force write-up this morning. And then turned to the article on “The Search for Fresh Executive Talent.” Seriously?