Bleak outlook for women looking for top positions in Chicago workplace but for women who wish to start and run a business, the outlook is good.According to Ratner, more women are starting business for themselves instead of trying to move up the corporate ladder because of the resistance they face there.Read more.
A new two-part study by the National Women’s Business Council examining the economic impact of both women-owned and women-led firm reveals that the contributions of women business owners have long gone understated. For the first time, these reports include data on women-led firms, where a woman owns a percentage of the business at least equal to any other owner and where a woman or women managed day-to-day operations.
I am so tired of issues pertaining to work life balance for women at the top of the ladder. Have you ever seen an article, "What It's Like for Men At the Top of the Ladder? Is work-family balance possible?"
It's a Sticky Floor: Free Yourself From the Hidden Behaviors Sabotaging Your Career Success.Forget the old boys' club: women are the ones holding themselves back from top-level career success, advises Shambaugh, president and CEO of consulting firm Shambaugh Leadership. Though more businesswomen are in successful positions of power, they are still lagging behind men at the highest levels: more than a third of Fortune 500 managers and more than half of those with multidisciplinary master's degrees are women, yet women hold only 13% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. This lack of forward motion is due more substantially to women's own career-inhibiting behavior than to cultural impediments, Shambaugh claims. Women are more likely than men to shy away from leadership roles, to get bogged down in perfectionism and to avoid career-boosting changes out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. Through a series of exercises and self-appraisals, Shambaugh guides readers with executive suite aspirations through an evaluation of their own behaviors and skills, gauging which serve their ambitions and which are holding them back. Emphasizing strategic relationships, communication and the elements of executive presence, she writes in an encouraging tone with a refreshing lack of blame, making this a satisfying read for women stuck in middle management limbo.This is definitely not a read for women entrepreneurs or women business owners. We know better.
When Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley human-resources consultant, heard Hillary Clinton assert that she could "take the heat" after getting pummeled by opponents in a recent debate, she recalled the times in her own career when a roomful of men disrespected her.This is why we started this blog. Go Valerie! Stop worrying about gender and move on to doing your own thing.
Once, at a national sales meeting for a large construction-products company, a male colleague passed around photographs of her in a bikini that he'd secretly taken on a prior business trip. "Instead of quitting, I focused on being better, on outselling the guys three-to-one," says Ms. Frederickson, who later founded her own firm, Valerie Frederickson & Co.
U.S. Commerce Department and Kauffman Foundation announce public-private partnership on entrepreneurship! The new web resource and symposia will advance entrepreneurship and economic growth in United States and throughout world.
See for yourself. But it definitely applies to global entrepreneurs. My favorite part of this post for the Small Business Trends blog is the Express Yourself video. After all, isn't that what we are doing everyday as women entrepreneurs?
Contrary to what this article purports, I believe all women, whether employed at BIG companies or running their own show (business), should create a:
Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay by Freada Kapor Klein appears to be an eye-opening book (haven't read it yet) filled with tell-it-like-it-is approaches for solving the current imbalance and challenges us to change our hidden biases in the workplace.
Do you think it matters whether you are first-born or last (the baby of the brood) when it comes to becoming an entrepreneur?Of all the things that shape who we are, few seem more arbitrary than the sequence in which we and our siblings pop out of the womb. Maybe it's your genes that make you a gifted athlete, your training that makes you an accomplished actress, an accident of brain chemistry that makes you a drunk instead of a President. But in family after family, case study after case study, the simple roll of the birth-date dice has an odd and arbitrary power all its own.I am the youngest of four children and definitely fit the bill on what Kluger says on later-borns also are more willing to take on risk (I am the only entrepreneur within the family). For instance, research by Ben Dattner, a professor at New York University, shows that firstborn chief executives prefer to make incremental improvements, while later-born CEOs are more likely to make transformational changes.
I saved this clip, "No Room Room for Entrepreneurs" by Mary Anastasia O'Grady published in the Wall Street Journal October 8th (available only to subscribers but I just found a reprint of it online at the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research) because I have always been a fan of the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). He was one of the most brilliant minds who ever lived, and had an electrifying personality to go along with it. Without his knowledge, we would never have understood the concept of what it means to be an entrepreneur. In a speech last year to European finance ministers in Vienna, Mr. Schramm explained Schumpeter's fears: He "worried that entrepreneurial capitalism would not flourish because the bureaucracies of modern government and big corporations would dampen innovation -- the process of 'creative destruction' would be too ungovernable for a modern, Keynesian-regulated economy to tolerate." As a result, Mr. Schramm said, Schumpeter thought that "the importance of entrepreneurs would fade over time as capitalism sought predictability from governments who would plan economic activity as well as order social benefits."Schramm is president of the Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship.
If you're a BIG company, put more women on your board! Why? Because your company will perform better. Read more here.
The Small Business Administration plans to approve grants for older Women's Business Centers by mid-January, finally implementing a program signed into law four months ago.
In all, there are 98 Women's Business Centers across the country. Last year they provided training and counseling to nearly 130,000 small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.A worthy cause that should never be an issue or in question.
Whether it's in the United States, Japan or Canada, a gender pay gap matters. When you read this, you'll understand why more and more women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men. 
Great little article on Rebecca Herwick, President of Global Products (who I know and became acquainted with after moderating a global business discussion where she was as a panelist)! "I've always been a biker girl," says Rebecca Herwick, who is one of the few certified women business owners with an official license to manufacture and distribute Harley-Davidson novelties, giftware and headwear to dealers worldwide.Read more about her success story here.
If you want to create a really useful invention, you should:
The SBA Advocacy funded paper "Are Male and Female Entrepreneurs Really That Different?," by Erin Kepler and Scott Shane finds that gender does not affect new venture performance when other factors are controlled for. However, several factors -- differing expectations, reasons for starting a business, motivations, opportunities sought and types of businesses -- vary between the genders, and these result in differing outcomes. Such observations should be taken into account when comparing the outcomes of ventures across genders.
Entrepreneur Anita Roddick dead at 64.
Carla Eng has some advice for budding women entrepreneurs: Have a solid business plan, fight adversity and don't give up. Sound familiar? 
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