Women account for 14% of small UK businesses

Men may still wear the trousers in the world of business, but do you know who chose them? According to Marks & Spencer, women make two thirds of purchasing decisions in menswear. Across the board, women make 80% of purchasing decisions.

This factoid demonstrating the power of women in the marketplace came out at a presentation at a Women in Rural Enterprise event in Somerset last week. Carolyn Currie spoke briefly about a scheme she runs for the Royal Bank of Scotland which aims to support women setting up and running their own enterprises.

Despite women’s dominance when it comes to purchasing, they are not surprisingly under-represented when it comes to running small businesses. Currie says women run just 14% of all small and medium sized enterprises in the country but they do contribute £130bn to the UK economy.

Just think what would happen to that £130bn economic figure if more women set up and ran small enterprises. With women constituting 52% of the population there is plenty of scope for us to increase our share of the small business sector.

One answer as to why more women aren’t more entrepreneurial may come from this statistic. One in five women is unemployed before setting up her own business. That compares to one in 15 men who go from unemployment to self-employment. It suggests a wave of previously stay-at-home women re-entering the workplace as self-employed.

But the times are against us. As predicted by the TUC in March, women are bearing the brunt of job cuts in the faltering economy. The Guardian reported last week that the number of women claiming unemployment benefit is at its highest level since 1996. More men than women are unemployed  but that’s because more men than women were working in the first place.

I don’t know why I find any of this surprising. It’s proof, not that I wanted it, of the continuing inequality between men and women when it comes to paid employment.