To quote entrepreneur Maggie Lena Walker, also, the first female bank president of any race to charter a bank in 1902, “To avoid the traps and snares of life, black women must band together, put their mites together, put their hands and their brains together, and make work and business for themselves.”
Make work and business for themselves they have indeed. Women of color account for 70% of start-ups in the US. In the last 20 years, this number has increased by nearly 500%. That means that 259 African-American women open new businesses daily, making them the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the nation.
All of this success comes in the face of tremendous challenges.
According to the Diane Project, there are a growing number of Black women-led startups crossing the $1 million threshold in venture funding, 93 in 2020 up from 34 in 2018. But the majority of Black female founders continue to raise significantly less in seed money, $125,000 in comparison to the median $2.5 million raised by start-ups owned mostly by white males.
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While many black women are drawn to entrepreneurship by their passions, the Black Ceiling, a term coined by Fortune magazine editors in an interview with former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, has prompted many to “make work and business for themselves,” because the corporate path does not seem a wise road to travel.
In fact, research shows that black, Latina, and Asian women combined hold only 3% of C-suite positions. The only Black woman to helm a Fortune 500 company is Walgreens CEO Rosalyn Brewer.
Black women are most likely to say they don’t have interactions with top bosses. Just 23% say managers help them navigate organizational politics, compared with 36% of white women. African-American women also report the highest rate of sexual harassment in the workplace, 19%, compared to 14% for Caucasian women.
When companies focus on diversity and inclusion – whether in the C-Suite, or their overall employee population – it is often framed as a problem. Our emotions go straight to issues of race, equality, and discrimination, bringing with them a ‘shame and blame dynamic’ that is counter-productive to often well-intended efforts aimed at creating a corporate culture that reflects the gender, racial, and cultural realities of the world we live in today.
The global conversation about women’s equality, however, must move from focusing on problems to highlighting solutions that acknowledge that different women have different experiences if we are to ever find the unity within our diversity.
There are answers out there. The Paradigm 4 Parity, for example, a movement created by a coalition of business leaders aimed at bringing gender equality to the C-suite has given 60 companies, including Accenture, Wells Fargo, and Coca Cola, a framework and actionable steps that allow them to benefit from diverse workforces – a proven benefit to performance and bottom lines.
Regardless, black women continue to transcend the need for validation from those who do not embrace all that they have to offer. Not only are they the fastest group of entrepreneurs in the country, but the National Center for Education finds that they are the most educated group in the United States, earning more degrees than any other, as they remind us all that there is no ceiling that will not be shattered by the resilience we have inside.
