Paul Martin commentary
This is women entrepreneur week in Saskatchewan and it marks one of those quiet success stories that often go unnoticed. It’s a success story because we have a disproportionately high number of female-owned businesses compared to the rest of the country.
There is a bit of word parsing in this story: businesses that are female-owned versus majority female owned but the concept is fairly straight forward. These are enterprises where the shots are called by women because they hold the bulk of the equity in the business.
According to provincial figures, more than one-in-five private businesses in the province fall into the female-owned category. That’s about ten-percent higher than the national average.
A StatsCan report on this group of enterprises conducted last year noted some of their unique qualities. First, they tend to hire more women and deploy them in more senior positions at a rate of 70-percent compared to 35-percent in the overall business population. They are also less likely to borrow money and are most frequently found in the professional, technical and scientific, health care and social services fields.
