The “glass ceiling” doesn’t block just the upper floors of the corporate tower. There seem to be a lot of ceilings out there. Many women like Cepeda, who believe they have “topped out” in big firms, look for a new start in a business they can call their own. “Corporate America is corrosive for women,” says Felice Schwartz, president of Catalyst, a woman’s advocacy group. “Many are going off on their own, where they can control their own hours and chart their own courses.” Yet once women leave the corporation, they often bump their heads again soon enough. They hit the usual problems of entrepreneurs, of course–from lost perks to night sweats over meeting the payroll. But many women face also unequal access to credit, exclusion from government contracts and, in some cases, overt discrimination-some of the same frustrations they thought they had left behind in corporate America. Says Ida Bialik, founder of Women in Business Yellow Pages for metropolitan Chicago, “We had a kind of a fantasy that we would be in control of our own lives if we owned our own business.”
Still, the “fantasy” Bialik talks about is tempting-and women are living it out in growing numbers. While statistics are sketchy, as many as 7 million women now run their own businesses, says Rieva Lesonsky, editor of Entrepreneur magazine. Women-owned businesses make up an increasingly important segment of the economy, generating as much as $500 billion in annual revenues, up from $98 billion 10 years ago. According to a recent study by the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), women-owned firms will employ more workers than all the Fortune 500 companies combined by the end of this year. And in the next decade, some experts predict, women will own half of all of the country’s businesses.
Going out on your own isn’t just about fulfilling fantasies, though. Family obligations, and the desire for more flexibility, play a major role. And some women, having seen the way the game is played in the big leagues, yearn to create a league of their own. In signing a joint agreement with the -Department of Labor regarding the glass ceiling last week, Small Business Administration chief Patricia Saiki said women business owners are charting new paths in business partially as a rebellion against the corporate obstacle course. “They bring with them the history of frustrated goals and ambitions, and they vow not to replicate those patterns in their own small companies,” she told reporters.
A nice thought-but businesses don’t work in a vacuum. Women who flee the glass ceiling can still hit the brick wall of sexism. The biggest shock of going solo often comes with the first trip to the bank. For many women proprietors, seed money is difficult-if not impossible-to come by. Roxanne Givens, president of Legacy Management and Development Corp. in Edina, Minn., was repeatedly forced to send her brother to the bank to secure financing. “They wanted to use his financial statement and not mine, yet I ran the business,” she says. When Marilu Meyer, president of the $7 million-per-year Castle Construction Corp., first approached bankers about start-up funding for her construction firm, they suggested she try a T shirt shop or a stationery store instead. “Women are not perceived as having a small business; we’re perceived as having a little business. It’s as though we’re doing it for pin money.”
The going can be tough in these male-dominated industries. Enita Nordeck, founder of Unity Lumber Products, in Yuba City, Calif., is still excluded from an all-male forest-products association known as Hoo-Hoo International-even though she was named the SBA’s Small Business Person of the Year in 1991. (Nordeck is eligible only for the Hoo-Hoo-ettes, an ancillary group for the ladies.) She couldn’t even play in the all-important lumbermen golf tournaments; though they might mean an important business deal, unwritten rules have kept women off the links. (Nordeck has organized a tournament of her own.) Lynn Wilson, founder of Lynn Wilson Associates International, a Miami-based interior-architecture and -design firm with projected revenues of $130 million this year, still must tread gingerly around subcontractors and construction crews: “If I tell a painter, ‘You know, that color looks a bit off,’ a hundred percent, without fail, he’ll turn around and say, ‘Hey, lady, you can’t tell me what to do’.”
As all entrepreneurs learn, going out on your own is no ticket to riches, anyway. While many are successful, few achieve the status of a Lillian Vernon or a Jenny Craig. Women-owned companies constitute a third of the country’s businesses, but they account for only 13.9 percent of gross receipts and are awarded only 1 percent of federal government contracts. In a study of 118 women proprietors by De Paul University professor Lisa Gundry, only 14 percent reported annual sales of more than $1 million. About 80 percent said they had fewer than 10 employees. While skeptics might argue that women entrepreneurs simply aren’t running their firms well, David Thornburgh, director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center at the University of Pennsylvania, says that because women are newer to business, “the support networks aren’t there.”
Now some government agencies are trying to level the playing field a bit. A few states offer juicy incentives to banks that agree to finance women’s start-ups. Under the Illinois Women’s Finance Initiative, every time a bank lends a dollar to a woman entrepreneur, the state treasurer transfers $1 into that bank. Some local governments, such as Chicago’s, are raising the stakes even higher–offering $4 for every $1 lent. Boston and other cities have inquired about launching similar programs. And the Small Business Administration’s Office of Women’s Business Ownership has begun three new initiatives, including a workshop that teaches women how to snag federal contracts. Government cash could be a boon–but it could also create new pressures. As more money flows to women, their businesses are sure to come under close scrutiny. Investors (read taxpayers) will want to see the return. Women entrepreneurs could well find that they’ve escaped the glass ceiling only to move into a glass house instead.
