Women's Entrepreneurship Day 2019

This Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, we have even more to celebrate. As part of our 75th Anniversary this year, BDC recently looked at the changing face of entrepreneurship in Canada and one of the key findings is more and more women are turning to entrepreneurship.

Women make up almost half of all entrepreneurs

We found that women entrepreneurs now account for 28% of all entrepreneurs in Canada and are growing 3.1 times faster than the number of male entrepreneurs. In fact, over the past 40 years, the number of female entrepreneurs has quadrupled.

This is important because a new study by the Boston Consulting Group found if women and men participated equally as entrepreneurs the GDP could rise by $5 trillion globally and $80 billion in Canada.

This represents huge potential and BDC is here to help female business owners realize it.

Making progress

And we are making good progress. This past year saw many fundamental shifts that translated to progress for women. Here in Canada, we saw the Federal Government launch the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy and commit $2 billion to women entrepreneurship. We benefited from many new funding sources, programs and initiatives to support women-owned and women-led businesses and saw a big push overall on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. BDC also continued its commitment to diversity and inclusion with the launch of our supplier diversity program.

Better together

However, we cannot do it alone. To help women reach their full potential we—men and women—need to support one another. We need to buy and recommend women entrepreneurs’ products and services. We need to offer our ear and advice to one another. And collectively, we need to push for more gender parity in workplace hiring, salaries, boards, and funding sources. We are better together and together we can all act to make a difference in gender equality.