John, before we go to that question, I think there's actually a deeper cause. Why are women starting businesses? If you look at the research around women entrepreneurs, you see that a lot of them leave the corporate environment, in many cases out of frustration. They say, “You know what? I've had enough of this. I'm going to do my own thing.”
Although 80% sounds like a large number, the problem is that you have a lot of women entrepreneurs who have no intention whatsoever of growing their business into a larger one. Most of these women entrepreneurs' organizations are very small. The vast majority are one-person shops. They started them for lifestyle reasons, not necessarily to contribute major revenue back to the economy. This is a mechanism to deal with the frustration they have encountered in their career progression, so you have a lot of very small businesses started by women, and they will never grow into the $1-million range, for example, in terms of revenue.
Once we look at the motivation for starting these businesses and whether there truly is any interest in advancing them, and we segment out the group that really does it for lifestyle reasons, and start looking at the ones who do indeed have an intention to grow it into a major business—maybe even adding more personnel and going into the $10-million range—then we can look at the barriers they are encountering. There is no doubt that there are some barriers. Again, a lot of research has been done that women don't get as much attention and access to capital.
Can something be done about it? Yes, I think most banks have woken up to the fact that these would be interesting customers. If they just put something in place that would be more attractive to women entrepreneurs, they might have a new customer base. I have a bit of faith that market forces will solve this one. I'm not too concerned about that. I know it might sound naive. I am more concerned about the women entrepreneurs who have stepped out and now do one-person shops because of the frustration that they couldn't progress in their previous careers.