Women-Owned Firms Make Up Sizable Shares of Some Industries But Tend To Be Smaller Than Male-Owned Firms

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau, women, blacks, Asians and Hispanics have built up substantial positions as business owners in several sectors of the U.S. economy.  But based on revenue, those businesses are on average considerably smaller than white- or male-owned firms.

Overall, men owned more than half of the nation’s 27.6 million firms in 2012, according to preliminary results from the Survey of Business Owners, and women owned more than 9.9 million businesses, about 36% of the total. The remaining 10% of firms were either jointly owned by men and women or could not be categorized by gender because they were publicly traded companies or have large, diverse ownership groups.

Read more:  Businesses owned by women, minorities lag in revenue share

Illustration credit:  Pew Research Center

Remember to Share Your Story

Successful entrepreneurs and business owners are busy doing what they do best:  building their businesses.  But how many of them share their stories on how they got to where they are in business so that they can help others succeed too (part of the WPO model)?

Read more:  Women on the move tell their stories

Are You Defining Performance by a Single Number?

According to David Rock and Beth Jones, a few years ago, they noticed around half a dozen courageous companies beginning experiments to remove ratings from their performance management systems.  Is your company one of them?  Companies were still differentiating performance in various ways, and still using a pay-for-performance approach, just not through a simple rating system.

Rather, companies prefer to emphasize ongoing, quality conversations between managers and their teams.

Learn more:  Why More and More Companies Are Ditching Performance Ratings

Is a RBF a Blessing or a Curse?

RBF (I'll let you find out what it stands for but let's just say it has to do with nonverbal cues, like facial expression, body language and tone), as a label, has become the latest Internet craze. A historical review of the term indicates it originated in 2009, but Google trends show Internet searches for the phrase took off in the spring of 2013. RBF has since become the subject of countless memes, often featuring celebrity examples. The hype reached new heights of controversy when it was written up in The New York Times on Aug. 1.

The question becomes:  As a business owner, is your RBF helping or hindering you?

Here's one woman's take:

At my [Rene Paulson] own company, I have worked hard to transform a negative into a positive, channeling my RBF to improve my leadership and strategic thinking skills while also building my tolerance to stress (all personality traits researchers at Caliper, a talent management company, have found endemic among high performing women).

Read more:  Women with "RBF" are actually better communicators