Women Empowered By Business
As we roar further into the 2020s, I’ve been thinking about Women’s History Month and the momentum that’s been made by women empowered by business over the years, and it’s quite impressive.
If you are of a certain age, you can probably look back at when you started working your first job and start to realize how far the world has come in just a generation or two. Back in 1984 when I founded my company, The Entrepreneur’s Source, the concept of women entrepreneurs was mostly just that — more concept than reality. When you look at the numbers from the past 40-plus years, it is clear how far things have progressed. In 1972, women-owned businesses represented just 4.6% of all businesses, but today, that number has skyrocketed to 42%, according to a 2019 American Express report. With that in mind, I thought I’d offer some numbers that show where things currently are when it comes to women in the business world.
More than 11.6 million businesses are owned by American women. That’s according to the National Association of Women Business Owners. Those firms employ almost 9 million people and, as of 2017, generated $1.7 trillion in sales. Some sources say $1.9 trillion.
In 2019, 1,817 new women-owned businesses were created every day in America. While we don’t yet know how many women-owned businesses were formed during the pandemic, it seems likely that the numbers continued to increase. Some evidence suggests that far more startups were created than usual; applications for employer identification numbers, a sign that new people are starting companies, also increased.