USA Today reports that there has been a growth in black female entrepreneurship. There have been more businesses started by young, black women since the government started counting (which quite frankly, was not very long ago), but anyways...

As women take entrepreneurship's lead, marketers from banks to tech companies are tapping black women as a new source of revenue. "It's a huge opportunity," says Angela Burt-Murray, editor in chief of Essence, a leading lifestyle magazine for black women.

Black women are launching companies for many of the same reasons spurring other women. They've gained corporate experience, but a glass ceiling keeps them from rising to the CEO's office. They're better educated. Self-employment offers more flexibility to care for children and aging parents.

Start-up costs have fallen as computers and other technologies grow cheaper. And the economy is shifting even more to retail and service businesses well-suited to corporate refugees.

Research from the Small Business Association found that black women owned 547,341 companies in 2002, up 75% from five years before. For men the jump was only 29%. It is predicted that soon more black women will be owning businesses then men. Now as mentioned above this is also due to the glass ceiling which stops black women (disproportionately) from being able to reach top corporate jobs.

But I prefer small businesses anyway.

via USA Today.

2 Comments

August 26, 2006 4:09 PM

[0+]  Alon Levy said:

Do you have any idea why black women are about to surpass black men, while white women are presumably nowhere near surpassing white men?

I know that in both the US and the UK, the only countries for which I have wage gap data broken down by both race and gender, the gender difference among whites is far greater than among minorities. I presume there's a standard explanation for that, but I have no idea what it is. Do you?

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August 27, 2006 5:57 PM

[0+]  tfreridge said:

Could it be because black women are being taught from birth by their single mothers that they can't count on men so they have to get educated and take care of themselves?

Since the majority of black homes don't have a father figure, could it be that black men are being taught by MTV and other media outlets that it's more important to be a "gangsta" and a "pimp" than to get a college education and be a father and a husband and a breadwinner.

I wonder what the statistics are about married stay at home moms? Is it racially inverse?

Or maybe the situation is much, much more complicated than that.

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