Entrepreneurs: Innovative. Creative. Increasingly Female.

To some, it was obvious that the COVID-driven demise of thousands of jobs would also open doors to new business opportunities. Companies closing left consumer needs unmet, and millions of courageous individuals seized the moment to fill those market gaps with their entrepreneurial goods and services. A significant percentage of those individuals are women, and they are raising the profile of the female entrepreneur higher than it’s ever been.

The markets they entered, however, have evolved significantly in those short four years. These newly minted enterprises are now navigating equally new pathways to economic success and redefining those processes as they go. Adding support to their efforts: Pasadena City College’s Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC) has just opened its Women’s Business Center to ensure that both established and emerging female business leaders have all the resources they need to launch and grow a successful organization.

It’s a New Day for Entrepreneurs

How work gets done in 2024 is decidedly different from how those goals were achieved just four short years ago. To succeed, today’s business owners must meld decades-old legacy systems with tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies and evolving consumer expectations. The challenges they face are significant.

• Technology alone has rendered many formerly foundational functions obsolete while also offering new capacities and capabilities. The latest digital tools, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) programming, have revolutionized occupations and industries at a pace that far exceeds that of related regulatory and governance standards. Many organizations struggle through transitions from outdated models to current options.
• Advancing technology not only streamlines existing processes, it also facilitates whole new ways of ‘going to work.’ The ‘gig’ economy (hiring workers for individual projects, not as full- or part-time staff), flexible working arrangements, and remote work, in general, are now commonplace. Companies experience a variety of benefits that arise from this ‘distributed workforce‘ model, including lower office maintenance fees and increased productivity. A notable change for workers: many in this new form of workforce rarely, if ever, meet their colleagues face-to-face.
• E-commerce is also on the rise, as more organizations aim their sales pitches directly at consumers, bypassing virtual or actual store-front intermediaries. The absence of intermediary boundaries between sellers and buyers gives the entrepreneur more control over the customer relationship – and the data generated by those interactions.
• A ubiquitous online presence coupled with almost instantaneous communication channels also facilitates collaboration and co-creation among entrepreneurs. Strategic partnerships are born when the ‘cog’ of one small business meets the ‘wheel’ of another, often in the same industry, but not always. These emerging ecosystems clarify the distinctions between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ ways of working and producing, giving both entities access to the broader toolset of the combined pair.

The skillsets needed to implement and manage these innovations are also, in many cases, new to the business and even the industry. Any company that upgrades its technology will also need to upgrade its technology support capacities. AI, in particular, is driving a huge push to develop responsive training programs and protocols as its suite of software programs is so different from (literally) everything that came before. Ironically, many AI and related technology courses are now offered through digital portals, which themselves need development or upgrades to be effective.

Regardless of the gender of their owner, newly launched companies must consider these and many other factors as they work to establish their mark in their new ‘economic neighborhood.’

Women Leading the Way

Recent data reveals that women are having a significant and profound impact on the post-COVID economy. According to research conducted by Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP):

• The number of women-owned businesses nearly doubled that of men-owned companies between 2019 and 2023.
• Almost 40% (39.1) of all American-based businesses are now owned by women. Over 14 million such companies employ over 12 million workers.
• The female-led business community alone contributes $2.7 trillion in revenues to the U.S. economy annually.

In fact, the corporate advances made by women throughout and past the pandemic were markedly more impressive than those of men:

• In 2020, while the world was shutting down, women opened more companies than they closed, while the number of male-owned organizations declined.
• Women also added 1.4 million jobs during the pandemic, which, in turn, contributed almost $580 billion to the national economy.
• Over the course of the COVID era (2019 – 2023):

• • the growth rate of women-led firms surpassed that of men by 94%,

• • the rate of employment by female- versus male-owned companies grew by 252%, and

• • the growth rate for revenues generated by women-owned businesses exceeded 80%.

The findings are notable, too, because of the industries in which these advances by female business leaders are being made. Branching out from their ‘standard’ corporate presence (beauty, pet care, and healthcare), women are opening companies in industries where their presence as leaders was previously limited, such as security and surveillance services, legal agencies, and mental and physical health professionals. The finance, real estate, and insurance sectors have seen the most post-COVID growth in the number of women-owned companies.

Pasadena City College (PCC) Provides Focused Support for Women Entrepreneurs

The federal government has also focused on expanding the – business ownership opportunity to more women in more industries. Through the auspices of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), PCC’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC) (a pillar within its Economic and Workforce division) received funding for one of only 17 Women’s Business Centers (WBC) established nationwide. Of those 17, 13 are based in Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), a U.S. Department of the Interior program. PCC is the only community college in the country to be awarded Women’s Center funding.

In coordination with the SBDC’s already notable success, the WBC will offer services tailored specifically to meet the unique needs of women entrepreneurs. Counseling, training, and technical assistance related to business ownership—financial management, start-up concerns, and marketing, as examples—are provided for free to any woman-owned enterprise, offering support and strategy where it’s needed most. The federal government reports that the number of loans made to women-owned companies is surging and now tops $5 billion per year.

The COVID pandemic and its fallout have compelled all company owners to adapt their efforts to address the market, labor, and consumer evolutions that have occurred since 2020. Added focus and funding for female leaders, in particular, both levels the corporate playing field with men while also harnessing uniquely feminine assets and values that have yet to be fully embraced within the corporate sector.