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.