Feminist businesses required for Canada’s economic growth, stronger communities

When I launched my small business, I didn’t know many entrepreneurs who looked like me and shared my vision.

 

I wanted to achieve a sustainable company with solid revenue, a great team and a growing base of clients. I also wanted to make the world a fairer, better place for diverse women and communities like the one I was a part of.

 

Representation has always mattered to me.

 

I didn’t see why positive social goals couldn’t be a component of my business success, and why my business success couldn’t act as fuel for positive social goals.

 

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and support many women small business owners pursuing strong businesses while pursuing social change.

 

The number of women-owned small and medium-sized businesses is booming in Canada, with 18 per cent of all businesses majority-owned by women.

 

More and more women entrepreneurs are Black, Indigenous and racialized and 2SLGBTQIA+.

More and more see themselves as feminist and social changemakers, interested in running their businesses to break the old startup mold.

 

I wish I knew them back in my startup days. Because when they talk about innovation and disruption, they’re talking about shifting status quos and balancing unequal power through their small business approaches and choices.

 

Simply put, feminist entrepreneurship is business to advance gender equality and justice. Feminist businesses run the gamut of services from credit unions, health centres and digital marketing shops to theatres, publishers, bookstores, restaurants and bakeries.

 

Chances are, whether you know it or not, a feminist entrepreneur runs a small or medium-sized business in your neighbourhood.

 

They’re not necessarily women, but they care about rights, freedom, safety and support for every individual, family and community affected by gender gaps and inequalities.

 

And they care about stubborn gender barriers that persist in Canada: gender pay gaps and caregiving crunches, epidemic rates of intimate partner violence, unfulfilled calls to action for truth and reconciliation and missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit people, workplace sexual harassment and glass ceilings and leaky pipelines.

 

Many feminist entrepreneurs know these barriers firsthand . Maybe their push toward self-employment came from a squeeze of the mainstream economy due to disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe they anticipate tidal workforce shifts too many marginalized women will face due to artificial intelligence and climate crises.

 

Whatever the impetus, they have no desire to uphold typical barriers in the way they run their small businesses.

 

They want to do all they can to pay their workers fairly and safeguard work-life balance. They want their employees to have the bandwidth and flexibility to take care of children and elders. They’re curious about new structures and practices to reduce bias, build healthy workplace cultures and promote diverse leadership. Their supply chains include many unusual suspects and under-tapped talents.

 

They want their teams and partners and clients to bring their full selves to the table: no need to push anyone into the closet or leave anyone out, no code switching required.

 

They do it because they want their businesses to mirror their fundamental values. They do it because they know these practices ultimately lead to better profits. They do it because they, too, have full selves they need and want to bring to work.

 

With Canada’s economic shakeups, affordability concerns and productivity problems in the news every day, it’s clear to me we have to turn to feminist small businesses as a solution. We lose too much when we miss out on investments in them.

 

We have to break the barriers to funding, definitively and finally. Feminist entrepreneurs regularly miss out on venture capital, loans and grants, with barely four per cent of VC funding going to women founders.  Women have to launch businesses with 53 per cent less capital than men. Not because they want to, but because of bias and typecasting as “too risky” and untested.

 

We have to make our entrepreneurial ecosystem a fertile environment for feminist businesses. Things are changing for the better, but there’s still not enough policy support for feminist entrepreneurs, and they’re often left out of the decision-making that impacts them. 

 

We have to recognize feminist small businesses exist in the first place. Those moments when we do praise entrepreneurs in Canada we tend to turn to male-dominated sectors like tech and manufacturing.

 

Let’s reward feminist innovators in all sectors, not just the male-dominated ones. Let’s research feminist entrepreneurial success and teach it in business school. Let’s strengthen our entrepreneurial ecosystem with the goal of growing feminist businesses in Canada.

 

We need it for our economic progress, our climate resilience, better workplaces and stronger communities.

 

But why don’t we start off in a simple way this Small Business Week?

 

Find the feminist small businesses in your local neighbourhood, or online.

 

And give their unique offerings a try.

 

 

 

This article was first reported by The Star