POLICY
RECOMMENDATIONS

RECOMMENDATION 1: Federal agencies could conduct and help grantee partners be equally accountable for smart, microtargeted outreach about government-funded technical and financial assistance that resonates with women innovators unfamiliar with that programming.

Government-backed programs and resource partners provide a wealth of support to small businesspeople, from seed investments in the development of promising technologies to advice with mature operational concerns like exporting. Too often, though, women in the trenches report that they do not know about, and sometimes do not trust public and publicly-supported programs. Researchers who conducted interviews for NWBC’s rural and Tribal women entrepreneurs research project, for example, rated awareness of federal resources as “nearly nonexistent.” Further, about half of policymakers and women business owners surveyed for a report on NWBC’s strategic communications indicated that they were not familiar with the Council in spite of being among its target audiences.¹²

The limited statistical evidence available affirms this sense of alienation. WOSBs typically earn fewer than 5 percent of all federal contracts. Large companies with powerful shareholders and significant capacity, as well as nonprofit entities like venerated institutions of higher education, can consistently invest in sorting through and applying for federal contracts and grants; they have developed specialized expertise in navigating opportunities. On the other hand, smaller firms and organizations struggle at all stages of the process. No comparable information is available about the leadership of organizations receiving federal grants, nor do agencies have the mandate or funding to universally require, collect, and analyze information from grantees about the clients they serve.

Information about federal investment in marketing indicates that spending is concentrated on discrete needs unrelated to business development assistance; although agencies’ advertising spending increased from 2018 to 2023, the largest driver by far of that cost was advertising to attract enlistees in the military.¹³ Public awareness campaigns promoting causes like safe driving and reporting suspicious behavior to authorities also figure prominently into federal agency advertising spending. Far less prominent, or evident, are expenditures to educate Americans about resources like WBCs or opportunities like business certification and competition for set-aside contracts. Thus, it is unsurprising that Americans give the federal government lower marks than the private sector for the communications and the customer experience it offers; customer experience may be shaped more by the government’s organizational priorities than by the imperative of serving individual’s needs.¹⁴

In the future, grantmaking and technical assistance-providing agencies could maximize the return on their communications efforts by microtargeting the populations they have been underserving.¹⁵ They could ensure consistent use of federal funds by evaluating their grantees’ and contractors’ work on that basis. Congress could support this work by authorizing and appropriating funding for specific smart outreach initiatives. Agencies could employ multichannel methods, such as social media, to reach historically underrepresented communities. They also could identify practical techniques for segmenting audiences and messaging by, for example, highlighting the Small Business Administration’s (SBA’s) online business guides in Internal Revenue Service communications to women who report self-employment in tax filings and might not otherwise identify themselves as business owners who are eligible for assistance, or by sending proactive introductions to APEX Accelerators, WBCs, Small Business Development Centers, and other resource partners to federal contract bidders and certified firms with no success in winning contracts. To further leverage their communications planning efforts, federal agencies could build grantee toolkits to help resource partners market inclusively to priority constituents by identifying who they are, the messaging, and the advertising channels to use.

RECOMMENDATION 2: SBA could lead an effort to identify secure information-sharing protocols, record and category standards, and cybersecurity requirements to enable expanded reciprocity and data exchange between business certifying bodies.

and partner with one another. They also become eligible to bid on a wider range of solicitations. Plainly stated, everyone wins when we successfully increase engagement with certification systems and the number of confirmed women-owned businesses.

Despite these benefits, not all women-owned companies opt for certification. Women entrepreneurs have shared many reasons with NWBC. Their hesitations stem from the fact that certification requires time and effort but doesn’t, by itself, guarantee business development. Also, government and private buyers base their purchasing decisions on different certifications, each requiring a separate certification process. According to the Equity in Infrastructure Project’s research,¹⁶ there are an estimated 300-400 certification registries for U.S. companies. Minimizing the effort required to secure valuable certifications would likely help persuade more entrepreneurs to participate in these programs.

In engagements over the past year with certification practitioners and experts serving in international, national, state, and local institutions, NWBC learned that while purchasers using certifications look for some idiosyncratic factors (for example, municipal agencies may require local ownership and operations), they also share many requirements and procedures in common across types and geographies. Stakeholders in the certification process, from business owners to the leadership of private and public certifying entities, are interested in increasing collaborations that leverage these commonalities. They still lack shared standards that could give all participants mutual confidence in the integrity and effectiveness of one another’s operations.

State and local governments and the private sector look to SBA for leadership on business certification and its use in procurement. Congressional creation of the WOSB program in December 2000¹⁷ was a watershed moment for this movement, and by virtue of its long service to a large, diverse nationwide population of women-owned firms, including those certified by its four recognized WOSB certification partners,¹⁸ SBA possesses a uniquely comprehensive body of knowledge and experience with the administration of certification. With these assets, SBA can lead stakeholders toward a shared embrace of high standards for information collection, review, storage, and transfer. SBA could explore the ability to offer data-sharing agreements to entities that adopt these standards, under which SBA could transfer small and disadvantaged enterprises’ confidential data, with their consent, to other certifying bodies for reciprocity and streamlined application purposes. State, municipal, and private sector actors would have the foundation they need to follow suit and form new partnerships that lower barriers to WOSB certification and increase the value of certifications to emerging firms.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Federal agencies could adopt common application elements for all contracts and grants and offer more live contact with agency representatives to expand opportunities for WOSBs in federal programs.

For federal agencies to increase purchasing from small, capacity limited businesses, and engage with community-based organizations in underrepresented communities, it requires intention and active effort that successive Presidential Administrations have committed to. Recent relevant procurement policy and practice changes include the issuance of instructions and methods to increase small business participation in multiple-award contracts, and improvements to expand personalized counseling and assistance to help potential federal contractors prepare to compete.²⁰ A federal procurement innovation ecosystem is collecting and promoting the more widespread use of barrier-lowering methods like requests for short proposal summaries based on which an agency narrows the list of offerors asked to provide full bids.²¹ On the grantmaking side, officials are working to increase the use of plain language and brief summaries in announcements, and to reduce announcements’ overall length.²²

Still, proprietors of WOSBs—which disproportionately lack a history of and experience with federal contracting—and organizations that serve them find that deep structural challenges remain in securing federal grants and contracts. The well-known disparities between the number of companies in the economy (overwhelmingly small, and about 40 percent woman-owned) and the composition of firms with federal contracts (just over 28 percent small, and only 4.91 percent confirmed to be woman-owned) and grants²³ substantiate anecdotal advocacy for change.

Among the pain points women entrepreneurs have identified, two stood out: first, the difficulty of producing quick responses to unique solicitations and notices of funding availability with widely varying application requirements, and second, the limited or nonexistent opportunity to speak with agency staff to clarify application requirements and build relationships that help small business owners submit more responsive, high-quality proposals. The burden on women-owned and other small businesses to meet the different requirements of each new opportunity could be neutralized if all federal contracts and grantmaking, regardless of responsible entity, could include as many uniform requirements as possible. The positive impacts of the increasing acceptance of the Common Application by undergraduate institutions of higher education²⁴ support WOSBs’ conviction that adopting common federal contract and grant application elements would facilitate their inclusion.

In addition, face-to-face question and answer and informational sessions give small business owners more accessible opportunities than impersonal written transactions to develop the kind of detailed understanding of agency requirements that larger firms already possess or can afford to hire expertise for. Research ²⁵ shows that women who maintain close business networks of female colleagues earn more and advance further than their counterparts, highlighting how these interactions could be particularly beneficial for underrepresented women-led companies and organizations.

Women Can Create and Leverage Power Through Relationships

In the process of convening stakeholders to explore policy solutions, NWBC has acted as a connector between agencies and other entities with related interests and has witnessed the value of making introductions and facilitating partnerships. Interagency collaboration can increase opportunities for underrepresented businesses, as we have seen in examples like the collaborative effort to attract more bids and procurement options between the Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion at federal financial regulatory agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Federal Reserve Board, Office of Comptroller of Currency, and Securities and Exchange Commission.²⁶ Whatever the venue or vehicle, we continue to see positive results from cooperation between government entities.

RECOMMENDATION 1: The White House and SBA could study and develop criteria for piloting expanded forgiveness of federally backed loans, building on the success of pandemic programs in transferring capital to entrepreneurs who have driven a small business startup boom.

As a rule, it has been effectively impossible for people without the typical equities (e.g., property to serve as collateral, existing savings, and a sound borrowing and repayment history) to get started as entrepreneurs, regardless of their talent and the merit of their ideas.

The Kauffman Foundation’s most recent Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs: Removing Barriers report found that women and entrepreneurs of color were more likely to rely on personal or family savings for business startups and less likely to access funding through financial institutions compared to their male and white counterparts.²⁷ The roots of this phenomenon lie in part in financial institutions’ risk mitigation practices that favor individuals with accumulated assets. For example, a national bank lists its criteria for business lending as including:

• Business credit.
• Personal credit standing.
• Repayment capacity, as evidenced by “at least two years of personal and business tax returns, a debt schedule that includes details of all of your business debts, and personal financial statements…business and personal assets, as well as cash reserves…[and] details about your accounts receivable, inventory, equipment and commercial real estate.²⁸

Women, particularly women of color, begin their journeys on unequal ground in relation to these factors: women operate younger businesses on average,²⁹ and have access to fewer business and personal assets.³⁰ The large universe of women-owned startups that arose and flourished in the post-pandemic period, and that may not yet have accumulated financial history or capital, are among those firms likely to be ill-positioned to access funding.

Government and non-governmental actors have pioneered innovations to work around or reverse the institutionalized disadvantages that women and other underrepresented owners face in seeking business capital. Still, historical patterns of access exist and have not yet been reversed. New paradigms for providing startup, operating, and expansion capital are necessary. NWBC is encouraged by SBA’s creative extension of its services into guaranteed lines of credit and sees a further opportunity to break new ground by conceptualizing a loan forgiveness program patterned after the successful Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Researchers found that PPP had the largest positive effects on business activity and expansion for the smallest businesses that received it,³¹ and that these infusions of capital improved sustainability and empowered small enterprises to reopen.³²

Forgivable federal loans for priority businesses—such as those whose creation and growth benefit the lowest-income and most underserved communities—could similarly empower emerging firms and upend the equation that says it takes capital to earn capital. Thought leaders, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, believe that disruptions like COVID-19 and programs like PPP, which operated similarly to a potential program providing startup loans that can convert into grants, unlock latent entrepreneurial desire and potential. Chamber Executive Vice President Neil Bradley pointed to the fact that the share of entrepreneurs who were unemployed when they started their businesses was only slightly higher in 2020 than in previous years: “You still have people who are entrepreneurs by choice who actually saw opportunity in the pandemic and seized it,” Bradley stated.³³

RECOMMENDATION 2: SBA and other agencies that regulate or work with financing institutions could develop and promote the use of criteria, tools, and best practices for finance decision-making that make it easier to act equitably.

On paper, women-owned businesses should make ideal candidates for loans and other investments. NWBC’s 2024 literature review of women’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) entrepreneurship found women-owned businesses excel on multiple fronts. For example: “Women entrepreneurs have better credit risk profiles than male entrepreneurs in all sectors, including STEM. There is no significant difference in leverage between female and male firms overall, and for bigger firms, male entrepreneurs are more leveraged. Female-led firms are more profitable than male firms after controlling for individual characteristics and other determinants of firm performance. Women business owners represent a high percentage of entrepreneurs offering innovative products, and women-owned startups generate more revenues.” A 2018 Boston Consulting Group analysis confirmed this point in concluding that women-led startups returned more than twice as much for each dollar of venture funding invested.³⁴

In practice, women, especially women of color, encounter biases and endemic gendered disparities. When women seek business financing, subconscious discriminatory attitudes and assumptions manifest in phenomena like the propensity of investors to ask women questions about risk prevention where they ask men questions about their growth potential, for example, “What does customer retention look like?” versus “How do you intend to acquire customers?”³⁵ Women’s negative experiences diminish their willingness to ask for resources, and further exacerbate inequity in access to funding. One review of grant funding administered by the National Institutes of Health determined that women were underrepresented among applicants, requested less money than male counterparts, and received an average of $40,000 less than men from firsttime research awards.³⁶

Growing bodies of knowledge and best practices that have proven to be successful in delivering funding to women owners, as well as the rapid advance of information technology, are making unprecedented advancements in creating equitable decision-making feasible. The more that accumulated data reveal underrepresented entrepreneurs’ strengths and achievements, the more incentive funders gain to recognize and overcome biases that have blinded them to good opportunities.

SBA and other agencies could encourage funders to make better and more equitable choices that also improve their financial positions by creating and disseminating guidelines and tools for equitable investment and extension of credit. These tools could include digital systems that flag inconsistent, suspect proposed financing decisions for further review, as well as training in considering applicants’ lived experience and technical knowledge.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Federal agencies could amplify the impact of successful regulatory efforts to expand access to capital by researching and reporting on additional innovations to manage lending risks.

including several who collaborated to release a February 2022 interagency statement, have become increasingly proactive in promoting alternatives,including Special Purpose Credit Programs, allowing lenders to consider expanded lending criteria to meet the needs of more historically underserved communities.³⁷

Some methods and factors that agencies and private sector actors have piloted, such as determining creditworthiness based on cash flow and bill payment history, are fairly well-established.³⁸ They have proven to be effective proxies for the ability to repay,³⁹ and are effective in widening the universe of financial institutions’ potential customers.⁴⁰ Banks also have reported positive experiences and financial returns on investments in, for example, businesses that are trained, vetted, and referred by trusted community-based organizations, regardless of their credit scores or lack thereof.⁴¹

These positive additions to financiers’ tools still leave some women entrepreneurs—particularly first-time business creators—likely to be underserved. We have more to learn about existing programs’ reach and equitable impact. While we build an empirical body of knowledge about alternative credit experiments, federal agencies can also leverage their influence to explore and encourage funders to test creative solutions to balance the risk of serving more people and businesses. NWBC’s ideas include developing philanthropic partnerships that combine private and public dollars to fund loan guarantees, and creating regulatory space for institutions to recognize financial, accounting, and tax knowledge as risk mitigators for potential business borrowers, functioning similarly to credit score criteria. We see an opportunity for agencies including SBA, the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Treasury, FDIC, and the Federal Reserve Board to lead ideation.

Women Can Create and Leverage Power Through Relationships

Research substantiates links between positive economic outcomes and the use of depository institution banking services.⁴² However, personal relationships have a big influence on access to banking, as demonstrated during the pandemic, when loans were initially issued, disproportionately, to well-connected and financially sophisticated firms.⁴³ In addition, relationships with banking industry leaders are persistently lacking for women. Women’s shorter average tenures as entrepreneurs and seekers of financing are a likely contributor. Further research and thought leadership could be helpful in identifying the best ways to ensure women build professional networks that help secure funding.

RECOMMENDATION 1: Congress could creatively allocate additional public support and construct foundational structures for affordable and widely accessible childcare.

Universal public education has been essential in this country for training future entrepreneurs and business owners; it also forms part of the nation’s infrastructure that enables parents to invest time and effort in their professional lives. Yet, there is a critical gap in ensuring the universal availability of care and positive developmental experiences for children younger than five. By experts’ measures, the cost of this oversight, and of the lost efforts of parents and caregivers who couldn’t secure affordable quality care, is heavy, and the prospective benefits of addressing it are immense. A study by ReadyNation recently concluded that working families, businesses, and government agencies collectively lose an estimated $122 billion each year to inadequate and unavailable childcare.⁴⁴ Conversely, according to a 2023 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisors, every $1 invested in early childhood care and education yields a $7 return to the economy.⁴⁵

In past annual reports, NWBC has recommended and highlighted widespread political consensus for public solutions that extend access to childcare, and this movement continues to build. Members of Congress have collaborated on bipartisan federal legislation to expand tax credits for families and employers paying for childcare services, and to supplement childcare workers’ salaries in areas of high need.⁴⁶ Members also formed a Congressional Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in 2023.⁴⁷ A private sector analysis found that the number and share of federal childcare bills that were bipartisan increased significantly from the 113th Congress, beginning in January 2013, to the 118th Congress, ending in January 2025.⁴⁸

Bipartisan thinking⁴⁹ on this topic acknowledges that the needs and costs are significant, and a single solution for raising and distributing public support for care has yet to form. Even with broad interest throughout the country and across the political spectrum, effective adjustments to budgets and systems that make it possible to provide for early childcare the way we provide for K-12 education may take time and experimentation. What is immediately urgent is that policymakers continue to take incremental steps forward that acknowledge the economic imperative of childcare and set the table for transformational change.

In the near term, Members of Congress could make more in-kind and tax-based support available to lessen the direct costs of childcare for more families. Members could, for example, authorize agencies to offer childcare providers free or discounted leases to use otherwise vacant space in and on federal properties. Or they might allow the use of funds in 529 Savings Plans for childcare expenses. State legislators could also authorize infrastructure that supports universal access to care, such as quasi-governmental funds that could accept public and private money to supplement parents’ fees and workers’ salaries and online exchanges, akin to public health insurance marketplaces, that could help match families to affordable care options.

RECOMMENDATION 2: SBA could support its grantee resource partners by regularly analyzing and promoting their accomplishments and considering whether reporting can be streamlined or automated.

needs. Tailored programming,a relationship-oriented approach,and activities that develop social capital are key practices consistently used by women’s business centers nationwide.” In light of their accomplishments, the federal government has directed increased funding and technical assistance to the community-based institutions that serve as WBCs. SBA has dedicated $30 million in unprecedented funding to expand this network in 2024,⁵¹ following on landmarks such as the 2021 announcement of the then-largest expansion of WBCs.⁵²

We believe that the value WBCs return to their communities is exponentially greater than the $150,000 capped grants they receive. Moving forward, updated data about WBCs’ positive impacts should capture their contributions in supporting childcare-related businesses and local, state and national economic ecosystems, in addition to the number of entrepreneurs and businesses they serve. Outside of SBA’s annual data collection, NWBC and SBA should co-commission a consistent and through analysis of WBC performance and effectiveness on a bi-annual basis.

By conducting more regular analyses, SBA is likely to bolster the case for robust funding of WBCs, which could help these resource partners raise more private support and achieve greater institutional sustainability and long-term impact. The agency’s Office of Women’s Business Ownership, which administers WBC grants, has the right data access and relationships to lead this work, but lacks adequate personnel. Congress has authorized funding to this office to hire a technical assistance manager; however, it has not yet appropriated sufficient resources.

SBA can also support WBCs by requesting that the U.S. Census Bureau collect relevant data or by sponsoring its own surveys of small business owners’ interactions with resource partners. As the agency becomes more active in evaluating and producing documentation of WBCs’ impact, it might also consider whether grantees’ program reporting requirements can evolve in ways that relieve burden and reduce the cost of staff time spent on purely administrative work.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Federal agencies could make entrepreneurial education a standard part of elementary, secondary, and college-level instruction and workforce training programs.

potential is the population of women who are disproportionately missing at present from the boards and C-suites of STEM and STEM-adjacent firms, and the ranks of creators who are the proprietors of emerging businesses. NWBC’s 2023 literature review concerning women STEM entrepreneurs concluded, “[w]e found that women are underrepresented in the STEM and STEM-adjacent fields. There are gaps in STEM earnings, funding, investment, intellectual property, patenting, and commercialization for female-owned businesses.”⁵³ This finding mirrors women’s underrepresentation among all business owners of any type.⁵⁴

Social science confirms that exposure and socialization help determine the professional pathways individuals follow. For example, a 2018 study of more than 1.2 million patent holders found that not only were people who grew up in high innovation areas more likely to invent as adults, but that effects were gender- and technology class-specific.⁵⁵ Early and consistent exposure to women business owner role models is likely to increase girls’ future entrepreneurial activity, as is active encouragement to pursue ownership. However, experience and familiarity with women’s entrepreneurship are in short supply, and women continue to constitute a marked minority of owners, especially of the most visible employer businesses. In addition, ownership of small family enterprises in fields including manufacturing and banking has declined, and with it, girls’ early exposure to their parents’ entrepreneurial activities that once formed the cornerstone of local economies.⁵⁶

Educational systems and workforce training programs collectively reach most, if not all, of us. As recipients of federal support, they are also potential vectors for the implementation of policies that fill in the gaps in our economy and help us achieve greater prosperity for all. Experts have proposed pursuing this goal of shared well-being by adopting universal instruction in business fundamentals.⁵⁷ Following their lead and having worked to make education and supports tailored to underrepresented populations a central feature of the Invest in America movement, Congress, the White House, and agencies could fund, advocate, and implement entrepreneurship education at all levels of instruction. For example, the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies could adopt and promote core curricular requirements that expose all students to the stories of women and women of color innovators and to experiential instruction in business management skills. SBA, in partnership with experts from Ed and other institutions, could adapt its training materials to elementary and secondary educational levels, and support the training of general-education teachers to encourage and cultivate entrepreneurial skills.

RECOMMENDATION 4: The White House could form an interagency working group to explore standardizing data collection about WOSBs using methods that capture community and social gains from women’s entrepreneurship.

used, and often the most authoritative source of information available on a variety of topics.”⁵⁸ The American Statistical Association affirms that, ⁵⁹ “[w]ithout federal agencies’ data collection and analysis, we would not have key insights into public health, economic trends, community issues, public safety, the environment, or countless other facets that are vital to our society.”

Historically, well-respected data-producing government entities have looked to financial markers as well as employment statistics to assess economic progress. The Census Bureau’s Economic Census summary statistics, for example, convey what are considered the most critical and telling factors: the numbers of firms and establishments, their revenues, the numbers of employees, and payroll costs. Similarly, the Department of Commerce spotlights what it identifies as “key economic indicators” on its performance website: gross domestic product, personal income, and dollar amounts of international trade and transactions.⁶⁰

NWBC’s research and outreach tell us that women in business have goals that reach beyond these markers and that women achieve success in ways that the economic data we collect at present may not capture. For example, the literature review NWBC commissioned on women entrepreneurs in rural, Tribal, and underserved communities identified a 2020 survey finding that only about one-third of Native American entrepreneurs are motivated to own a business by income— instead, most wanted to achieve autonomy or provide a critical service to their community or had other personal reasons. Other studies found women of color wanted to create businesses that addressed challenges owners had encountered in their personal lives, with one author stating, “Black women who own businesses tend to be highly motivated by a passion for their industry… Serving their community also was expressed as a strong motivation for starting and running a business.”⁶¹

Gauging advancement by measuring social cohesion and higher quality of life alongside financial and employment gains would help to more fully understand, value, and promote women-owned businesses. The Office of Management and Budget, with guidance from the White House, can convene a federal working group to explore more inclusive data collection in its capacity as coordinator of the federal statistical system. Participants might include representatives of SBA along with personnel from the Department of Commerce and other agencies that produce data.⁶² The group could create, and coordinate testing of, survey prompts that collect data about topics like new businesses’ provision of basic or essential goods and services, mentorships, formation of business partnerships with other entities, and activity or renovations in previously unused space.

Women Can Create and Leverage Power Through Relationships

Policymakers have an opportunity to broaden access to paid family and medical leave for solo entrepreneurs and WOSBs by building structures, such as opt-in public insurance plans, to facilitate their formation of partnerships. Coverage could become affordable if risk were shared by larger pools of cooperating owners and their employees. For example, professional and trade associations like the Washington Technology Industry Association do critical work empowering small businesses to grow by offering members shared benefits programs that include insurance, back-office services, and access to a network of similarly situated entrepreneurs.