Mark Harbeke

Today's post by Angela Jia Kim on Mike Michalowicz's Toilet Paper Entrepreneur blog, on five reasons why women entrepreneurs are the new face of small business, is the latest in what seems to be a flurry of press on the topic of women in business. Here are some other clips I've seen recently that underscore this:

How Government Can Help Women Business Owners (Wall Street Journal)
Self-Employed Women Balance Work, Family Life (Sloan Network)
A Change for the Better? (Slow Leadership)
top companies for female executives (Cheezhead)

I don't know if it's President Obama's signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; Sam's Club and Women's Economic Independence's Make Mine a Million $ Business Race which garnered a lot of press recently and has helped bump up search traffic for women entrepreneurs; or something else. Regardless, as the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) notes in a press release today, the nation’s more than 10 million women-owned businesses generated almost $2 trillion in sales in 2008.

Talk about a stimulus plan! NAWBO suggests as much in their release on the results of a new survey of their 8,000 members, which finds that more than half of them say they have no plans for layoffs and that, further, a quarter of them plan to add jobs this year:

As the fastest-growing segment of the market, women entrepreneurs are vital to the growth of the nation’s economy and are at the heart of any sustainable recovery through job creation and revenue growth.

Our Top Small Workplaces are representative of this movement. Four of our 15 winners last year are led or co-led by women. One, Resource Interactive in Columbus, Ohio, has been female owned and operated since the interactive marketing agency was founded in 1981. Their innovative workplace team building and employee engagement best practices – including an open workspace that everyone, including the CEO, share and giving employees one share of stock in each of their publicly traded client companies – have helped fuel their impressive average annual revenue growth of 55% the last few years.

So are women the real economic stimulus? What do you think?