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Unique Management Style of Women Small Business Owners

Executive Summary 
December 2010                                                             Download Full Report    PDF 192 KB

The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute, www.smallbizdom.com projects that women small business owners will create 5 to 5.5 million new jobs across the U.S. by 2018, transforming the workplace of tomorrow into a far more inclusive, horizontally managed environment.

Based on The Institute’s projection, women-owned small businesses will generate more than half of the 9.72 million new small business jobs expected to be created, and roughly one-third of the 15.3 million total new jobs anticipated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by 2018.  This projection is striking, given that women-owned businesses currently account for just 16 percent of total U.S. employment according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Importantly, The Guardian Life Index:  What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners provides new insights about the professional management approach practiced by women small business owners – one that will significantly transform the workplace environment for millions of Americans in the coming years.  According to The Guardian Life Index, women small business owners create their own businesses for a variety of reasons, but a common theme is their dissatisfaction with the corporate track, based on their desire to avoid worrying about office politics. As owners/managers, they are:

• More diligently engaged in strategic and tactical facets of their business
• More proactively customer-focused
• More likely to incorporate community and environment into their business plans
• More receptive to input and guidance from internal and external advisors
• More committed to creating opportunities for others
   

Rationale for the Projection:
The Institute’s projection that women small business owners will create 5 to 5.5 million new jobs across the U.S. by 2018 is based on a rigorous analysis of converging factors, including the faster growth rate of women-owned businesses vs. male-owned; higher college graduation rates by women vs. men; and the predicted growth of industry sectors and occupations dominated by women. The projection also reflects the timely fact that women-owned businesses are more often self-funded than male-owned ones and are therefore less reliant on bank financing at a time when many say small business lending practices are more restricted.

Below are the key statistics and sources from which the projection was derived:

Support for increasing the historical growth curve of women-owned businesses includes the following:

• Increasingly disproportionate number of women college graduates vs. males (a large wave of leading-edge women Millennials will also the enter business-forming age during the decade)
• The U.S. Department of Labor projects that women-dominated job categories will grow by as much as 50% by 2016
• Traditionally, the majority of women-owned small businesses have been single-person enterprises (approximately 80%). However, the ratio is being affected by the growth of larger women-owned small businesses. The fastest-growing segment of the job market is larger women-owned small business companies.

The growth analysis is supplemented by new insights from The Guardian Life Index.