A Female Success Story; More Women Own Businesses Than Ever

More businesses than ever are owned by women in the U.S.

Women have been starting businesses at a rate twice as high as the national average according to Census Bureau date released in January, stated research.

The number of companies owned by women shot up by 20 percent nationally and 24 percent in California between 1997 and 2002, according to a recent article.

The number of women-owned businesses also increased in most parts of the Bay Area of San Francisco, CA, said the article.

By 2002 women owned 6.5 million businesses or about 30 percent of all U.S. nonfarm companies, according to Ilana DeBare, a writer.

"Like businesses in general, the vast majority were single-person enterprises," DeBare reports. "But a growing number were midsize and large companies."

DeBare said experts said the current boom in women's business ownership is part of a trend that began several decades ago.

She stated that in the 1970s and 80s the feminist movement opened new doors for women into all kinds of professions.

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, some women chose to leave corporate jobs and start businesses as a way to gain time for their families.

"For women with some corporate experience one thing that has tended to be a real barrier is not having much control over their time," said Jonathan Leonard, a professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, in the article.

Leonard added that meanwhile women's entrepreneurship was being encouraged by government initiatives such as programs to set aside a certain percentage of contracts for women- and minority-owned businesses.

"As more and more women started their own businesses, banks started providing capital, markets started opening up to them, and women became involved in established networks for expertise, coaching and referrals," said Sharon Hadary, executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research in Washington in a recent interview.