Special Report: Women Entrepreneurs: She Calls All the Shots

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Whether big or small, enterprises begun by women are having an increasingly significant impact on the U.S. economy. Their revenues are estimated to be more than $100 billion a year. They pay about $37 billion in federal taxes and $13 billion in state and local levies. Female-owned firms tend to be small, and their numbers are rapidly growing. They are expected to be a major source of new jobs in coming years. The Small Business Administration estimates that companies with fewer than 500 employees created about two-thirds of all new jobs in the U.S. from 1980 through 1986.

Last spring the House Small Business Committee held hearings to examine the growing role that women entrepreneurs are playing in the U.S. economy. This week the committee will release a report of its findings. The lawmakers gave TIME an advance copy of the report, which concludes that the increase in the number of companies owned and managed by women may be the "most significant economic development of recent years . . . Women-owned businesses have become a central factor in the American economy and will become even more crucial in the years ahead."

The committee also found, however, that women business owners still face considerable difficulties, especially in gaining access to commercial credit and bidding on government contracts. In addition, contends the committee, women need better technical and managerial training to ensure the growth of their enterprises. Says the report: "Women have had to work harder, wait longer, manage with fewer dollars and be content with smaller operations just to maintain their present levels of independence and business success." For that reason, the committee is recommending that the Government take several steps to help women entrepreneurs, from giving them more loans to making it easier for them to get federal contracts.

Many forces are propelling women into the ranks of business owners. First of all, more women are prepared to run companies than ever before, since millions of them have landed professional jobs in fields that were once male dominated. Yet the most ambitious women, like their male counterparts, are no longer content to work for someone else when the rewards for striking out on their own can be much higher. Says Charlotte Taylor, president of Venture Concepts, a Washington consulting firm: "Women have gotten deadly serious about business ownership, not only as a career option but as a wealth-generating option. They are approaching it with exactly the same reasons and rationale that men do."

But many women have a greater incentive than do men to set up their own shop, because they believe they are still discriminated against in large companies. That view shows up in a survey by Robert Hisrich, professor of business at the University of Tulsa, and Candida Brush, a graduate business student at Boston University, who interviewed 344 women business owners for their 1986 book, The Woman Entrepreneur. Asked why they decided to found their own firms, many of the women said corporations still offer few opportunities for women to advance beyond middle management. Observes Katherine Bulow, Assistant Secretary for Administration at the Department of Commerce: "Women get to a certain point and feel that they are not going any further. They take what they have learned and set up their own firms."