Editor's Note: The following is the fifth story in a five-day series about the advances and difficulties of women in Athens' academic, professional and cultural scenes.
They gush over how welcoming Athens has been. They praise the area's chamber of commerce for offering them assistance. Many say their gender plays virtually no role in how they handle their businesses.
But interspersed with their overwhelmingly positive sentiments, female business owners in Athens offer subtle tales of discrimination. One jewelry shop owner was told she would need a co-signer to get a loan from a local bank, only to have another, larger bank grant her the loan without hesitation. A female dentist in town sometimes still has older customers ask when the dentist is coming, even when she is already there.
And the statistics are even more telling: though female-owned businesses in Athens from 1997 to 2002 grew, those businesses collectively didn't make as much money.
Athens County's 1,157 female-owned businesses ' 29 percent of all businesses ' put it 39th among Ohio counties, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2002, the most recent year an economic census was taken. That's an increase of 51 businesses ' or 4.6 percent ' from the county's 1997 total of 1,106 female-owned businesses.
It sounds like a nice boost, but Athens County's increase pales when compared to increases on the state and national levels. From 1997 to 2002, the number of female -owned businesses in Ohio increased from 205,044 to 229,973 ' a gain of 12 percent. Nationwide, female owned businesses increased from about 5.4 million to 6.5 million, a gain of about 20 percent.
And even as the number of female-owned businesses in Athens County increased, the sales generated by those businesses fell drastically. In 2002, female-owned businesses in Athens County brought in just more than $64 million. In 1997, they brought in $303 million, and with 51 fewer owners. In five years, sales decreased 79 percent.
Small, but doing well
Despite the collective decrease in business, female business owners in Athens say their businesses are doing well.
Jenny Anderson, owner of A Lasting Impression, said her gift basket and floral shop on Columbus Road quite literally grew out of its space. After three years of running a home-based business, she moved to her current location in 2006 and now works with a female partner who keeps the books. Her baskets cost anywhere from $30 to more than $100.
Anderson, like most female business owners in the area, praised the chamber of commerce for its help. She said her biggest problem is common to all business owners: she's just trying to get people in the door.
It's businesses like Anderson's ' those with no real employees that still do well ' that explain why the number of businesses can increase while revenues decrease, said Sharon Hadary, executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research in Washington, D.C. She said Ohio and the United States also have seen slow revenue growth to go with large increases in the number of female-owned businesses.
Using census data, her center projected that from 1997 to 2006, the number of female-owned businesses in Ohio increased by 42.1 percent but sales decreased by 7.5 percent. For the same time period nationally, the number of female-owned businesses increased by 42.3 percent, but annual sales only increased by 4.4 percent.
I think a lot of it is the influx of businesses doing business without employees and being very successful at it
Hadary said. They're not employing lots of people they're doing very very well and they're hiring contractors when they need them.
Subtle discrimination
Kris Cornwell, owner of Cornwell Jewelers at the north end of Court Street, said she has seen a large increase in the number of women running jewelry shops over the last 12 years, just based on her experience at annual American Gem Society conferences. She said women in the jewelry industry are uniquely qualified to own businesses because other women make up the majority of their customers.
But Cornwell hasn't had a completely smooth ride as a female business owner in Athens. In 2002, when she wanted to move the location of her jewelry store, a local bank told her she would need a co-signer to get a loan. Cornwell, who declined to identify the bank, could not understand why that was, especially after another bank granted her the loan relatively easily. The only reason she could come up with was that she was denied the loan based on her gender.
It still makes me mad
she said. If my brother had gone and asked for money
they would have given it to him.
Nicole Conrath, who owns Conrath Family Dental Care, has had similar, albeit less serious, experiences. Older customers occasionally will ask her when the dentist is coming in the room, not realizing she is the dentist.
But Conrath said in dentistry, there's not really a glass ceiling. And even if there was, she grew up in a family that told her to ignore it.
I think I grew up in a fortunate time because I was always encouraged to be anything I wanted to be
she said. There was never any 'you can't do that because you're a girl.' That didn't exist.
That sentiment is increasingly becoming a reality, but women still need better access to coaching and business networks, particularly in small towns where formal training is sometimes considered unnecessary, executive director Hadary said.
We still see women lagging men
and we still have some questions
so I think there's still a lot of work to be done on both sides of the fence
she said. We've come a long way
but there still is a great deal to do.
