If we are going to advocate for anything for women, I would think we’d advocate for our own freedom. Freedom from societal sex role scripts, yes, but also freedom from being required to fulfill anybody’s expectations — even those of our female peers.

Freedom means having options. If you don’t like my options, you don’t have to live them. But don’t tell me that I shouldn’t live them, either.

That’s when you’re trying to take my freedom away from me, in the name of fighting for my freedom.

As of this year, an estimated 8.1 million (29%) U.S. firms were women-owned (51% or more), generating almost $1.3 trillion in revenues and employing roughly 7.7 million people. That’s the main finding of an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data on women-owned businesses performed by our old friend Julie Weeks of Womenable.com for American Express [...]

It looks like the SBA is finally going to implement that Women’s Federal Procurement Program that so many women’s groups were fighting about with the Bush Administration for eight long years. It all started back in 2000 when President Bill Clinton signed the Equity in Contracting for Women Act, which called for the SBA to [...]

If you don’t happen to be directly involved in the ongoing debate over health care reform, then you might do worse than to focus your energies on the many and varied ways to give the U.S. economy another little push toward recovery. That’s one way to look at last week’s release by the National Women’s [...]

Regular readers of The MicroEnterprise Journal are doubtless aware of how fond this reporter is of research and data. However, regular readers will also know that sometimes a piece of research covered by this publication comes to conclusions that seem to me to be deeply flawed. The latest release from the SBA Office of Advocacy, [...]

A Senate Small Business Committee hearing last week explored the ongoing challenges faced by women and minorities, and small business owners from distressed urban and rural communities, when it comes to access to capital. The picture portrayed through witness testimony was pretty grim. It was also hauntingly familiar. We learn that collateral and net worth [...]

The Senate Small Business Committee also held a roundtable last week to examine the challenges and opportunities facing women buisness owners 20 years after the federal government formalized its support for them with the Women’s Business Ownership Act, signed in 1988. Women owned businesses have come pretty far in the last 20 years but they [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released the results of a new study on women entrepreneurs and how they stack up against their wage and salary counterparts in several measures of general and specific human capital. Basically, the study found that self-employed women are better educated, have more managerial experience, have more life experience [...]

As advertised, both the House and Senate Small Business Committees held hearings last month to look into those infamous rules proposed by the SBA to implement the Women’s Procurement Program. The program, based on a 2000 piece of legislation signed by President Clinton, has hit an absurd series of snags to implementation, primarily because the [...]