I'm not in the business of making recommendations. As a government official I'm generally in the business of trying to respond to the recommendations made by these committees.
I would encourage you to stay focused on what we can realistically do as government to respond to the needs of this particular sector, things that we can do to be service-focused and things that we can do to provide directed training. I'll give you one example. I often hear anecdotally from women entrepreneurs a line that goes something like this, “If I had known when I started the kinds of things that I know now about financing, I wouldn't have...”. Then you can fill in the blank. For example, they wouldn't have given away so much equity, or you can just fill in the blank.
Read the Orser study. Read the task force report. You'll see that it's a common feeling for women partly because, as Dr. Konrad said, they may not be going through the same educational processes as young men are. It may also be they don't have the strong networks. They haven't heard in the locker room, “Hey, did you know there's a really good guy who can give you a loan at this bank?” They don't have those networks, necessarily. The more we can fill in the blanks using institutions like the BDC.... I'm sorry I keep pointing to you. I actually interface very closely with the BDC, and they're a very valuable resource. They have such a wide array of offices across the country to leverage that, for instance, to target women entrepreneurs to help them improve their financial literacy. Using a financial institution like this bank is something the government could do in a more targeted way. We already do that in a broader way.