The hearing on "Empowering Women Entrepreneurs" was hosted by the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee and held in conjunction with Women Influencing Public Policy’s annual leadership meeting in Washington, D.C. Witnesses ranged from women business owners who have benefited from government programs to Barbara Corcoran, one of the sharks on the ABC reality show "Shark Tank," who was thrilled to get an official U.S. Senate coaster as a souvenir of her first congressional hearing.
Lots of ideas on how to help women business owners were presented at the hearing, including a report prepared by the committee's Democratic staff. Here are three things Congress and the federal government could do:
Enable more women business owners to access capital
Women business owners have a harder time getting loans than men do. Women own around 30 percent of all small businesses, but they receive only 16 percent of small business loans, according to the committee’s report. In terms of dollars, women's share of business loans is only 4 percent.
Corcoran, who started her real estate business with $1,000 provided by a friend, put a face to these numbers. Both from her experience in the business world and her experience on "Shark Tank," where most of her fellow angel investors are men, "I can tell you that women have only half the shot in any situation of getting their hands on the cash."
The Senate’s largest hearing room was packed Wednesday afternoon with more than 200 women business owners who were so enthusiastic that they had to be reminded that it's against the rules to clap and cheer during a congressional hearing.
The hearing on "Empowering Women Entrepreneurs" was hosted by the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee and held in conjunction with Women Influencing Public Policy’s annual leadership meeting in Washington, D.C. Witnesses ranged from women business owners who have benefited from government programs to Barbara Corcoran, one of the sharks on the ABC reality show "Shark Tank," who was thrilled to get an official U.S. Senate coaster as a souvenir of her first congressional hearing.
Lots of ideas on how to help women business owners were presented at the hearing, including a report prepared by the committee's Democratic staff. Here are three things Congress and the federal government could do:
Enable more women business owners to access capital
Women business owners have a harder time getting loans than men do. Women own around 30 percent of all small businesses, but they receive only 16 percent of small business loans, according to the committee’s report. In terms of dollars, women's share of business loans is only 4 percent.
Corcoran, who started her real estate business with $1,000 provided by a friend, put a face to these numbers. Both from her experience in the business world and her experience on "Shark Tank," where most of her fellow angel investors are men, "I can tell you that women have only half the shot in any situation of getting their hands on the cash."
The federal government has never reached its 20-year-old goal of awarding 5 percent of all its prime contracting dollars to women. Failure to reach this goal has cost women business owners nearly $6 billion in contracts every year.
In 2000, Congress addressed this contracting gap by passing legislation to create a contracting program that would allow procurement officials to set aside contracts for women in industries where they have been underrepresented. That program wasn't implemented, however, until 2011, and initially capped the size of the contracts at $4 million ($6.5 million for manufacturing contracts.)
The program also was limited to women business owners in 83 industries. Plus, this is the only small business contracting program that doesn't have sole source authority -- the authority to negotiate a contract with a single company instead of putting the work out for bid. As a result of all these factors, only a fraction of federal contracting dollars -- well below 1 percent -- are awarded through this program.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who chairs the small business committee, thinks it's time to give sole source authority to the women's procurement program. That position got a big cheer from the women business owners when Cantwell addressed them before the hearing. SBA Administrator Contreras-Sweet also endorsed this change.
Cantwell also wants the SBA to speed up a study about whether the program should be expanded to additional industries.
I ncrease funding for Women's Business Centers
Around 134,000 women business owners receive business training and counseling every year from the SBA's network of nearly 100 Women's Business Centers, which are operated by and partially funded by nonprofit organizations.
But this program hasn't been reauthorized since 1999 and needs updating, the committee report concludes. It mostly needs more money -- government funding has remained flat even as the number of centers have grown.
Not everyone in Congress agrees; the House Small Business Committee, for example, thinks the program should be ended, because it duplicates the counseling provided through the SBA's network of Small Business Development Centers around the country.
But Victoria Wortberg, program manager for the Washington Center for Women in Business in Lacey, Wash., contends that Women's Business Centers are needed because they are the only SBA counseling program that is required to serve minority and low-income women.
"We are dedicated to helping women in underserved communities create jobs in the community and create wealth for their families," Wortberg said.
by:
- Kent Hoover
- Washington Bureau Chief
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