Pictured above: The Canadian Women’s Foundation’s Feminist Business Summit in September 2024 in Montréal, Quebec.
October 20 to 26 is Small Business Week in Canada.
Women-owned small and medium-sized businesses are 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 in new ways.
What is Feminist Entrepreneurship?
In simple terms, feminist entrepreneurship is business to advance gender equality and justice. Feminist businesses run the gamut of services: credit unions, health centres, digital marketing shops, theatres, publishers, bookstores, restaurants. They’ve existed in Canada since the 1960s. More than simply “women in business”, feminist businesses advance gender equality goals by:
- Setting up work conditions to push back on traditional practices that marginalize diverse women and equity-seeking workers, using collective models, inclusive models, and intersectional models of doing business.
- Generating income to offer human services and employ people who are underemployed, under-supported, and underseen.
- Grounded in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that aren’t just as “nice to have” but core to performance and growth.
Why Do We Need to Support Feminist Entrepreneurship?
The Canadian Women’s Foundation knows supporting feminist small businesses and reducing gendered labour force barriers can build gender equality and act as a growth driver – especially important in Canada’s “productivity slowdown” with a “drop in living standards, worsening wage stagnation and a dangerous deterioration in public services”.
Government, philanthropy, and customers and suppliers have to break barriers women and equity-seeking entrepreneurs face:
Barriers to venture capital, loans, investments, and grants. Research shows that women launch businesses with 53% less capital than men and there are gender biases and access/structural factors that get in the way.
Barriers to recognition and data. For example, feminist-focused approaches aren’t often noted or tracked in studies related to women and diverse entrepreneurs.
Barriers to support: things that don’t get researched simply don’t get benefits of government policy improvements and investments. They too easily get forgotten – that’s why we have to speak up.
What Can You Do This Week?
Help this Small Business Week by counting yourself in to be a part of the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s community to support gender equality and feminist entrepreneurship. And find a local feminist business online or where you live and try their unique offering and wares.
