My journey to create Feminomics began in the fall of 1996, the day I learned that 37% of American businesses and one third of Canadian companies were owned by women. I was stunned. These figures did not line up with my understanding of the world of economics.  Today, American women own 47% of all American companies. In 1996, I was a senior, female, Canadian Foreign Service officer specialized in economics and the commercial world. I was paid to know how the world economy worked. And Women being such an important part of the North American economy was a total surprise to me. I was in for many more astonishing discoveries. I learned that, women have been entering the world wide labor force in numbers twice as high as men since the early 1970s and that this is why the world economy has grown so significantly in the twentieth century. In fact, it was American women entering the USA labor force since the 1970s that has not only fueled American economic growth, but it was their participation in the labor force  which enabled the American middle class to maintain its standard of living! Without American women, the well being of the middle class may well have moved backwards.

I knew from twenty five years of first-hand experience living in Africa, Asia and America that there were plenty of powerful and successful women in the world. My globe trotting, life experience had also taught me that where women had access to education, health care, economic opportunity and political voice their families, communities and countries thrive. I had observed particularly in my third world postings that changes in communities could in fact take place quite quickly when women were the focus of action.

However, I had also witnessed a truth which seemed to contradict women’s enormous economic contribution. It is also a fact that the vast majority of the world’s poor citizens were women. I knew that my colleagues around the globe who worked on women’s rights and poverty issues were immensely frustrated by the slow progress being made on “dealing with women’s issues” and the roots of their poverty. Even to this day, the United States has not ratified the major international treaty that establishes women’s rights, the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) which was passed by the United Nations in 1978.

In my experience, no matter which continent I happened to live on, women were generally portrayed as being victims and needing special support and protection. The general consensus seemed to be that helping women was the right and morally correct thing to do, because women were not able to take care of themselves. While I and many people believe passionately that women’s rights are human rights and that indeed taking care of women is the morally right thing to do,  it has also been my unfortunate experience, that obtaining funds  and programs targeting women and ensuring women’s human rights are respected, is incredibly difficult and slow work. While there is much lip-service at all levels of public discourse, real attention, money and progress are sadly lacking, despite the important work of many men and women over many decades. While everyone seems to agree that women’s issues are important, women and issues of gender remains a tough sell and a marginalized issue, although there are encouraging signs in many different areas across governments, multilateral institutions, non-profits and even on Wall Street.

If anyone should have known about the women entrepreneur figures, I should have.  My specialty was international trade and economic development.I also happened to be the first woman appointed to the position of Minister Counselor Commercial at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, a position that necessitated considerable knowledge of both the USA and the Canadian economies. How could this kind of seismic shift in the make-up of the economy have occurred without my knowing it? How could I reconcile all the information that I later learned which placed the economic well being of the world squarely on the shoulders of women with the reality of global poverty? If women were such powerful global actors why was it that no one seemed to be talking about it?  Where were the economists, the policy makers, the feminists? Wasn’t this a good news story? Wasn’t this a way to build new economic policies that would accelerate economic growth for everyone’s benefit? It was an intense conundrum for me.   As I began the journey to Feminomics, I discovered that I was not alone and I was not the only one who was ill-informed. In reality, almost no one seemed to know the magnitude of women’s economic importance. 

  The United States government as it turned out when I first started looking at these questions did have pockets of understanding and women’s trade missions were a regular but not frequent part of programming at the US Department of Commerce as far back as the early 90s. The Small Business Administration housed the National Women’s Business Council which is now a 20 year old organization whose mandate is to advise the President and Congress on issues affecting American women business owners and is a wonderful model of how to anchor women’s economic issues into the legislative process.

  On the Canadian side of the 49^th parallel this question of women entrepreneurs was to spur a flurry of research and resulted in new government programs for American and Canadian business women as well as the most significant commercial and policy cooperation between American and Canadian business women in history. The first Canadian Women’s Trade Mission to Washington DC with the Minister for International Trade, the honourable Sergio Marchi, leading 125 Canadian women entrepreneurs received enormous press in Canada and changed some of these women’s lives profoundly. The follow up US-Canada Trade Summit for 250 American and Canadian women business owners was the first time ever that the American Secretary of Commerce, the head of the Small Business Administration, the Canadian Minister for International Trade, the Minister of Industry and the Minister for the Status of Women sitting together, heard briefings from both American and Canadian business women about what needed to be done at the policy level to facilitate the growth  of trade across the Canada-US border. What I learned through these adventures, and incidentally what the US and Canadian government learned along with me, was that women were a rapidly, growing and powerful economic force in both countries. What also became apparent was that women were operating largely under the radar screen. They were not connected to the power structures in the same way that their male business counterparts were.

When connected however, women’s economic strengths combined with politicians’ and high level policy makers’ interest in economic growth and connecting with their electoral base created a powerful formula for change. We had demonstrated in the American-Canadian context that supporting women’s economic strengths brought new levels of commercial activity, press coverage for everyone, and enhanced understanding and connection between women and the political system. The ten year follow up to Canadian Women’s Trade Mission alone has been measured in the tens of millions of dollars.

My interest and research around my growing understanding of women’s true role in the world economy lead me to further impressive facts and figures. I referred earlier to figures that came from a riveting article in the “Economist” in 2006 called “Womenomics”. The article concludes that women entering the workforce drove the global economy of the 20^th century, not the INTERNET, China or oil and gas. Even more impressive was their claim that it will be the entry of the rest of the world’s women into the productive economy that will drive global economic growth in the 21^st century.

The United Kingdom through its “Strategic Framework for Women’s Enterprise” has identified women as the single biggest potential growth sector for entrepreneurship in the entire country and is particularly targeting minority women. Figures for women business ownership in the United Kingdom lag far behind those in Canada and the United States. The economic strategy of the UK government is clear- If levels of women’s entrepreneurship approaching those common in North American could be achieved, serious, sustainable new economic growth would be possible across the United Kingdom. The situation is similar throughout the world. The Global Economic Monitor 2005 brought out a new report on Women and Entrepreneurship which provides the first ever comprehensive information set on women entrepreneurs on a global basis. It found that female entrepreneurs represent more than one-third of all entrepreneurial businesses globally. This figure would certainly be much higher if the informal, unmeasured part of the global economy were to be included (all those “mom-but-not-pop” shops and businesses that are not formally registered, do not pay taxes and have few employees). All in all no matter how it is measured, women entrepreneurs are clearly a huge part of the global economy and yet it seems no one thought it important to measure it until 2005!

However, as is the case in the United Kingdom (and in the United States and Canada but to a lesser degree), while women are making major positive contributions to the world economy through their entrepreneurial activities, they are consistently underrepresented compared to men. Just as the United Kingdom’s government recognizes that the largest untapped potential for entrepreneurial growth in the country is to focus on bringing women into the sector, a similar approach on a global basis also seems to make sense and is in fact being pursued by governments and international institutions although sporadically.

I was rapidly developing a new passion.  It seemed to me that this type of economic analysis had the potential to project quite a different image of women. The stereotype of women as powerful economic actors was a vast shift from women as victims. The startling facts, my questions about women’s economic empowerment and what a growing role in the economy could mean for the wellbeing of the world, particularly for the women of the developing world, hounded me. My scouring of research papers, learning about the experience of the non profit and governmental sector  and investigations of resources in the academic world, led me to the startling conclusion that I needed to pursue a Ph. D. focused on the Economic Empowerment of Women. It seemed to me that our global stereotype of women as the world’s nurturers and care-givers simply did not extend into the economic realm.  I felt that somehow in 1996 I had stumbled into a situation that let me see in an instant of time that, the lens through which I had been viewing the world was out of date. In fact it was just plain wrong. What I was “seeing” was the result of my societal and cultural upbringing which had trained me how to “see” women. Questions about women’s empowerment, women’s largely unheralded role in the economy, how to accelerate women’s global economic impact and how to bring about a broader realization of this aspect of women that seemed to be hidden, were already dominating my life. What I needed was an avenue to contribute what I was seeing and learning to the global dialog on these issues. It is my hope that coining the word “ Feminomics “and writing this book:  Unleashing the Economic Power of Women will accelerate the recognition of women’s importance as economic actors.

 Feminomics began as a tiny glimmer of a realization. It began as my personal rebellion against the inaccurate and incomplete stereotypes about women that I held, that were applied to me, and that seemed to be generally applied to women. Feminomics is all about putting a new lens in front of ours eyes, seeing the cold hard facts for what they really mean and in the process shifting radically our understanding of what women’s strengths and power look like. It is my ardent hope that in bringing a more accurate perception of women to the forefront, it may be possible to bring a better balance to this world with women being valued and respected in ways that are brand new and for men to be respected for the many nurturing and caring functions that they do and have the potential to carry out.

 At this juncture it may be useful to highlight the five basic premises upon which I have based and organized my work and studies:

Premise 1:  Since the 1970s women have been prime drivers of global economic growth as labor, entrepreneurs, consumers, investors, and philanthropists

Premise 2:  Where women benefit from education, health care, enabling cultural environments and economic opportunity, the benefits to family and community are significant and larger than when similar economic opportunities are provided to men.

Premise 3:   Despite their stellar economic contributions, Women remain the world’s most under-recognized and under-utilized economic resource.

Premise 4:  Women’s Economic growth and empowerment is an attractive policy option for high level policy officials and politicians

Premise 5:  Growing economic empowerment of women will lead to enhanced balance in political, social, and cultural empowerment

Feminomics introduces the concept of a gender lens to economics and turns upside down our traditional understanding that women are peripheral to the economy. Feminomics makes a compelling case that women, not men drive the global economy- a role that will only continue to grow throughout this century.  In fact, Feminomics contends that, if the world is to thrive, women increasingly must be the focus of economic thinking.

In the global economy, no nation could survive without the contribution of its female population. Ironically, women are also our single greatest under-developed and under-used economic resource. With the right environment, women have significant untapped potential to contribute even more to the world’s economic health.

Countries seeking to maximize economic growth will have no choice but to critically examine how they are facilitating the role of women in their economies. If they don’t, they will be left behind by those who understand that in fact their women are critically important to achieving economic growth targets.

Women are also our best hope to eradicate poverty. Research is increasingly showing us that when women have control over their earnings, family well-being improves dramatically –as much as twenty times more significantly than when men exercise this traditional right.