Women: Engines Fueling Small Business Growth

Women play an increasingly important role in small business development, indicate statistics from a variety of sources, including CPA’s Women’s Voices ’96 survey. Three out of 10 women want to own their own business; this percentage increases substantially for women of color. Two-thirds of all women believe more should be done to help small businesses get off the ground.

There are still big obstacles facing women entrepreneurs – namely a lack of access to capital (although this situation is improving) and a lack of established business networks through which important business knowledge is shared both formally and informally.

There are steps that state governments can take to surmount these hurdles, says Anne Mosle, Director of CPA’s Women and the Economy program:

• Mentoring and training programs help women-owned businesses grow and succeed.
• Expanding Community Reinvestment Acts to include state-chartered banks can make lending to women-owned businesses a state-enforced priority.
• Expanding linked deposit and incentive deposit programs to include lending to women-owned businesses helps women overcome credit barriers.