Discovering the "Femterprise" Phenomenon - Building Gender Balanced Business

• It took The Times some time to notice, but give it credit: When it did, it made a big deal of the rocketing growth of women’s businesses.

• “Budge over, boys. The next decade will be women’s,” the London newspaper opens, pegging its prediction the forecasts of Jeremy Baker, an ECSP Europe Business School trendspotter who has forecast a 10-fold rise in the number of UK blue chips run by women (that would still be 4 in 10), a doubling of the number of members of Parliament (also to about 4 in 10) and — this one isn’t so hard — “100% growth in women-owned start-ups!”

• The last point is the wedge of what The Times calls “the rise of ‘lipstick entrepreneurs’ (otherwise known as independent businesswomen),” and the newspaper featured three of them while noting the overall growth.

• It’s yet another “Full Monty” analysis of the rise of women at work and in business (it’s supposedly all because more men are not working, thanks to the recession), but at least this time women are the focus: “With a nothing-to-lose attitude, women have been rolling up their sleeves and jumping in to bail out the boys.”

• Whatever, for the facts speak for themselves: More and more women are starting businesses, with more than 1 million self-employed women in Britain and a growth rate in the US twice that of male entrepreneurs.

• So about those three entrepreneurs. They are:
1. Simone Brummelhuis, head of The Next Women, an online magazine for women in business.
2. Catherine Reynolds, founder of Assembly, a small PR and communications agency that aims to support British fashion talent in design and manufacture.
3. Sanchita Saha, founder of CitySocialising, a platonic social network for meeting people in your area.

The Times report on the phenomenon and profiles of the three entrepreneurs