Hurdle Jumping
Despite recent improvements, women entrepreneurs are still facing barriers to success
Since launching her business in 2014, entrepreneur Connie Stacey has come up against roadblock after roadblock that her male counterparts rarely, if ever, had to contend with.
“It has been brutally tough and it took a long time for us to become established enough to even be taken seriously,” says Stacey, who founded Edmonton-based Growing Greener Innovations after creating an industry-disrupting portable plug-and-play and infinitely scalable energy system.
Stacey launched her business because she wants to make the world better — reducing greenhouse gas emissions and eliminating energy poverty across the world. But as she grows and scales her business, she has experienced bias both blatant and unconscious — everything from potential investors assuming she has no technical expertise to grants consistently being denied until a man’s name is on the application.
It’s why she believes it’s so important to track and analyze data related to businesses owned by women and marginalized people. To understand the enormity of the challenge, we need data from which we can begin to develop solutions, she says.
“What gets measured gets managed,” says Stacey. “How do you fix it if you don’t even know where to begin?”
That’s where organizations like the Ryerson University-led Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH), a national network created with the support of federal funding in 2018 as part of Canada’s Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES) to help create a more inclusive ecosystem for women and diverse entrepreneurs.
Women entrepreneurs across Canada continue to face systemic barriers. Today women are just 16 percent of majority owned businesses in Canada although they account for almost 40% of self employed Canadians. Women entrepreneurs are more likely to be in services sectors and tend to be under-financed as programs and services tend not to be designed for them.
“Entrepreneurship is a pathway to economic growth and an inclusive ecosystem is critical to supporting diverse women entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs are also more likely to help advance environmental and social goals,” said Wendy Cukier, founder of Ryerson’s Diversity Institute, and WEKH Academic Director.
The hurdles, already big, became even bigger during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the current economic state even earning the moniker “she-cession.” In fact, women were more likely to sell, shut down, discontinue, or quit their businesses as a result of the pandemic, according to a new analysis of research published by WEKH. Released in March, the 2022 State of Women’s Entrepreneurship in Canada report found that during the first quarter of 2021, fewer majority women-owned businesses remained fully operational, compared to other businesses and more had laid off at least one employee since the beginning of the pandemic. Of those who laid off employees, 71.9 percent had reduced their workforce by at least half.
Despite the systemic challenges that persist, WEKH’s report found that women remain undeterred, even as significant work remains. And, the evidence shows women entrepreneurs are good for the economy, showing high-growth and earning potential.
Source: State of Women Entrepreneurship in Canada Report 2022