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The past decade has seen steady growth in opportunities for women in business and one spectacular bright spot of opportunity on the internet. Let's take a look at some of the highlights and moments from the past decade.
Business School
Allow me to begin with inserting myself in the narrative. I graduated with an MBA in May, 2000 helping to set the stage for the needle finally moving on the percentage of women in business school. For the first time in decades, this past decade saw several top schools approaching or reaching 40+ percent female enrollment.
Corporate CEOs
From the classroom to the boardroom, the number of female CEOs is finally growing, as well. The world of consumer packaged goods where I went to work after business school is a prime example as women helm two of the largest companies in the world - Pepsi and Kraft. From 2000 to 2009 the number of women Fortune 500 CEOs increased from 3 to 15, including 3 women of color (Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Andrea Jung of Avon Products and Ursula Burns of Xerox).
Business Owners And Entrepreneurs
Women are rocking the world of small business as well. "[A] new study by the Center for Women’s Research, which included this remarkable point: If women-owned businesses were a country, they would be the 5th largest GDP in world." In the United States, growth of women-owned businesses has more than doubled the overall rate of business startups.
Women-owned businesses tend to be small, however. For example, "while women-owned firms account for 40% of all privately held firms, only one in five women-owned firms [in the U.S.] has revenue over $1 million." Globally, micro loans have been used to facilitate women's entrepreneurial development and economic empowerment.
One striking example of the type of small business and entreprenurial women's growth over the last decade is illustrated by the rise of Etsy. Women are estimated to make up to 90% of Etsy sellers and some have hustled their way to six-figure incomes selling their creative handcrafted wares.
Billionaire Business Women
There have long been spectacularly wealthy women who inherited their riches from husbands and fathers. Increasingly however women have risen to the ranks of the world's billionaires through their own business acumen. Now television network mogul Oprah Winfrey, former eBay chief turned Republican candidate for California Governor Meg Whitman, and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling are just a few examples of women who crashed that particular boys club.
Opting Out
One of the hot debates of the decade was about the perceived "opt out" movement where successful women chose to leave the business world to stay home and raise children. The hype was shown to be an "overblown myth" and women of color found that their experience did not match that of the primarily white women originally profiled.
The Web and Social Media
Women constitute a growing presence on the web and in social media communities and have created or helped create many popular spots in cyberspace like Kirtsy and Flickr. Powerful women help run some of the dominant internet and social media destinations like Facebook and Google. Companies co-founded by women like Six Apart help us share our voices on the web. Those of us who spend time in cyberspace have our experiences increasingly shaped by women.
The explosion of social media and the growing presence and dominance of women on the web and in community spaces might be attributed to some to the greater use of collaborative work styles by women. BlogHer itself is a prime example of all of these trends and it is an understatement that its creation is one of the shining highlights of the past decade of women in business.
The Future
I think the next ten years will see much of the same growth we saw this decade; i.e., women will increasingly start, run and lead businesses of every size. We will continue to see incremental growth at the highest levels of corporate America but we will still be far from parity or satisfaction. Women will continue to be nickled and dimed and earn less than men for the same work. However, I am optimistic that opportunities for leadership, innovation and equality will continue to increase rather than decrease for women in the decade ahead.
Related Reading
United States Small Business Administration: Women-owned Business Economic Research
Lahle Wolfe at About.com: Women in Business: Accomplishments of Black Women in Business of the Decade
