- 10.1 million firms are at least 50% owned by a
woman or women.
 Forty-six
percent (46%), nearly half, of all businesses are at least
50% owned by a woman or women.
- Women Business Owners employ 35% more people than all
the Fortune 500 companies combined (from Business
Women's Network - October 12, 2004)
- Between 1997-2002, the number of privately-held majority
or 50% women-owned businesses grew by 11%, more than
1 1/2 times the rate of all privately-held firms.
- One in every eleven adult women owns a business.
- More than 18 million workers are employed by a woman
business owner.
- One in seven workers is employed by a woman-owned
business. Ø Women entrepreneurs generate nearly $2.3 trillion
in revenues to the U.S. economy.
- The number of women-owned employer firms grew by 37% between
1997 and 2002, four times the growth rate of all employer
firms.
- One in five women-owned businesses is owned by
a woman or women of color.
Facts about enterprising women in American
History*:
- The Declaration of Independence—the first with signatures
attached—was printed by order of Congress, January
18, 1777, by Mary Katherine Goddard (1738-1816, a
woman whose prominence in the war of independence led to
her Baltimore publishing company getting the Congressional
commission for the job.
- After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873 rejected her right
as a woman to be licensed to practice law in Illinois, Myra
Bradwell (1831-94) worked toward reform in the legal
profession by founding the Chicago Legal News, which was
to become the most important legal publication west of the
Alleghenies.
- When Frank Leslie died, he left to his wife a newspaper
that was $50,000 in debt. His wife legally changed her name
to "Frank Leslie" and took over the newspaper,
building it up to be one of the best-known papers of its
day and when Mrs. Frank Leslie (1836-1914)died, she
left almost half of her two million-dollar fortune to suffrage
leader Carrie Chapman Catt to further the "cause of
Woman's Suffrage."
- Henrietta Howland Robinson (Hetty) Green (1834-1916)
built herself up as an independent financier to be the richest
woman in the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
and the 34th richest person in the world. She bucked tradition
by succeeding in a male-dominated world and paved the way
for the women who have followed her.
- Marketing genius Brownie Wise (1913-1992) changed
the fate of some little-known plastic kitchenware that had
always been sold from the shelves and department stores.
Wise organized a Tupperware party to bring the product into
customers' homes and forever changed the face of marketing.
*Excerpted from Virginia G. Drachman's Enterprising Women:
250 Years of American Business (University of North Carolina
Press: 2002). The exhibition website is at: http://www.enterprisingwomenexhibit.org
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