Entrepreneurial Woman

A contingent of small-business advocates convened in November for the singular purpose of getting just the facts on facts. The National Research Agenda Strategy Conference, sponsored by the National Women's Business Council, attracted almost 100 leaders of entrepreneurial research, government, academia and the private sector to determine which women's entrepreneurial issues were most in need of substantiation.

"Numbers, data, statistics-those are the only things that are going to change perceptions," says Mollie Cole, conference participant and president of the National Association of Women's Business Advocates. "Decisions about programs, whether [they're] entrepreneurial training or financing, are based upon good data."

The conference covered a range of issues, including access to capital and credit, state and federal governments' support of women's entrepreneurship, and women business owners' economic performance. Yet, according to Cole, one particular issue kept surfacing: the need for an archive of women's business research. "There's no one place where you can get good, current data on women entrepreneurs," Cole says.

The purpose of the conference, says Cole, was "not to present any answers but to really get at the questions and the methodology for answering those questions." Cole characterizes the project as "definitely long term" and hopes that eventually it will inspire not just more studies but more tangible studies. "We know a lot about women business owners' characteristics and problems," she says. "But we don't know very much about women-owned businesses overall."

Chances are, we may know a lot more very soon. "It was exciting to see all these [influential] people expressing a commitment to women's business ownership," says Cole. "This is a commitment no one is taking lightly."

This article was originally published in the February 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Entrepreneurial Woman.