The Data On Women Entrepreneurs In New Brunswick Are Concerning
David Campbell is a Moncton-based economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle podcast, Insights. The following piece was originally published on his blog, It’s the Economy, Stupid!, on Substack.
There are some interesting and conflicting data when it comes to self-employment differences between men and women in New Brunswick.
The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, Entrevestor, Propel, and others have good data on the breakdown of tech founders’ gender and that data is showing some positive trends. But I’m equally interested in woman entrepreneurship at a wider level.
We know from the data that entrepreneurship historically tends to have a gender bias: there are far more male-owned companies in engineering, construction, transportation and more women-owned companies in personal services.
The new census data on this will not be out for a while but there are already a few interesting data points to chew on.
The first statistic is the number of people declaring self-employment income on their taxes. As you can see in the chart, the number of men with self-employment income is going down year-over-year. In the last 20 years, there has been a 6,500-person drop in this category. That’s an 11 percent decline just since 2009.
For women, by contrast, there has been a 17 percent increase since 2009 and a 28 percent increase since 2000. In fact, in places like Moncton, Fredericton, and Saint John, the number of men and women declaring self-employment income has essentially converged.
You will say this is great for women entrepreneurship, and it is interesting, but I’m not so sure. The average net self-employment income declared by women is still only around $11,500—while it’s $18,700 for men. So it looks like a lot of women (and men for that matter) are reporting relatively small amounts of self-employment income.
All the accountants out there hold your nose because I am not going to get into a discourse on the difference between self-employment, employment, dividend, and other sources of “income” that a self-employed person may (or may not) declare. All we are talking about here is one proxy for self-employment: net self-employment income.
In general, we can agree that thousands of more women with self-employment income is a good thing. This data is for 2019 but I will be interested in the more current data as it seems to me there has been an explosion of micro-entrepreneurs since the pandemic. These are usually craftsperson types that produce small batches of candles, confections, jams, booze, or durable goods.
For the most part, I love the micro-entrepreneur movement (farmers’ markets, pop-up stores) as I think it enriches a community and allows the person to make a few bucks doing something they love.
But I am trying to get to serious entrepreneurs looking to build a business with employees, markets, capital investment, growth potential. And the data on this is less encouraging. When you look at Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey and the number of people who are self-employed and have paid staff, the number of women is on the decline, dropping by a thousand or so in the past few years.
Now it is the Labour Force Survey and there is a margin for error but the fact that there are 3.4 times more men than women who are self-employed and have paid staff is concerning. Again, when the census data comes out we will get more clarity.
I’m not sure what all this means but, in general, based on what we have seen with women-led companies in New Brunswick, I think this should be concerning. Not everyone has entrepreneurial chops but do we have the right policy and support environment for women that want to own their own business? Are they exposed to mentors?
The old trope that women are not hard-wired to be risk-takers and therefore naturally not inclined to business ownership needs to be revisited. I think the issue of children and family might be more of a challenge for women but even that seems to be somewhat of a social construct that can be surmounted.
Anyway, the old white guy musing about the “whys” or “why nots” of women likely means I have strayed outside the lines a bit. But you have the data, do with it what you will.
Huddle publishes commentaries from groups and individuals on important business issues facing the Maritimes. These commentaries do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Huddle. To submit a commentary for consideration, contact editor Mark Leger: [email protected].