Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for inviting me.
Allow me briefly to introduce Femmessor. We are a Quebec organization that has been devoted to the development of women's entrepreneurship in Quebec for the past 25 years. We offer financing and coaching particularly to women entrepreneurs from all regions of Quebec.
To maximize the potential of the Canadian economy, we need to promote diversified and inclusive economic growth. Unfortunately, female-owned businesses are still a small minority of Canadian SMEs: only 15.5% of SMEs are majority female-owned, compared to 66.4% that are majority male-owned. According to statistics, this gap is even wider in the manufacturing, technology and all innovative sectors, where women are largely absent.
Female entrepreneurship has experienced remarkable growth in recent years. Entrepreneurship intentions among women in Quebec more than tripled between 2007 and 2017. And this rate is twice as high among immigrant women. However, the COVID-19 crisis has hit women entrepreneurs harder, which threatens to widen the gender gap.
That is one of the findings of a survey conducted by Femmessor in collaboration with the BMO Chair in Diversity and Governance at the University of Montréal and the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub. The findings in this report are worrisome and shed light on the need for additional steps to ensure that women entrepreneurs can participate fully in the economic recovery.
Highlights of the study include the fact that women entrepreneurs were hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Two-thirds of the companies surveyed were operating at less than 50% capacity during the crisis in the spring, and one in five entrepreneurs did not think they could survive the crisis. In addition, women-owned businesses have distinctive characteristics. They are in the sectors most affected by the pandemic. We are thinking, obviously, of the retail industry, personal services, the arts, culture, housing and the restaurant industry.
In many instances, women-owned businesses are also small businesses. Consequently, the financial resources that they can use to address such a crisis are limited. They also experience financing issues, as my colleague said. According to our study, 42% of the women entrepreneurs surveyed indicated that they were actively seeking funding to ensure their survival or to adapt their service or product offerings in response to the pandemic.
After exhausting the government assistance available, their funding requirements averaged $54,000. However, only 20% of respondents said that they intended to take advantage of the measures put in place by the Government of Quebec and the Government of Canada. When asked why, many said they did not qualify for the programs. The high level of debt among women entrepreneurs is also a major concern according to the study. In the spring, the most-used government measures among women entrepreneurs were definitely the Canada emergency business account and the emergency wage subsidy. New measures have since been implemented.
The crisis has also affected the women themselves. They have more family responsibilities and are experiencing more stress, which has, in some instances, made it more difficult to achieve work-life balance and to manage their businesses. We also learned from the survey that women need training and coaching to help them go digital and to support them in innovation, business development and networking.
What needs to be done? First of all, we need to step up our efforts to ensure that women are fully engaged in the economic recovery and that they do not lose the hard-won gains of the past 10 years. A gendered crisis requires a gendered response. Consequently, the economic recovery plan must include specific actions to revitalize the sectors that employ the most women. Women entrepreneurs can play a leading role in creating a resilient economy, not only because of the role they play in providing essential services to our population, but also because of their role in creating strong and diverse local economies.
Lastly, women entrepreneurs can be a driving force in creating a sustainable and green economy. According to a major Canada-wide study, Canadian women are more committed to taking action on climate change than Canadian men.
We need to increase support to women entrepreneurs, build on expertise from entrepreneurial ecosystem partners, including Femmessor, and work together to ensure that no businesses lag behind in generating the expected level of prosperity.
The various special assistance measures for women entrepreneurs naturally include financing and customized ongoing coaching to address the many needs identified. For example, at Femmessor, we place an emphasis on financing plus coaching, which has yielded a survival rate of approximately 80% for our companies after five years. There are also advisory services, codevelopment, customized training, and an emphasis on a diversity of female role models. Femmessor does all of these things.
I would like to congratulate the Canadian government for its leadership in the development of women's entrepreneurship, and for its sensitivity to the problems faced by women entrepreneurs during the crisis. Femmessor is grateful to the government for its trust in us, and for awarding us the largest grant under the federal Women Entrepreneurship Strategy to an organization that specializes in women's entrepreneurship. This support was also increased during the COVID-19 pandemic to help hundreds of women entrepreneurs transform their business model and adapt their products and services in order to become financially viable again.
Quite simply, what we are requesting is that financing for the many programs established by the government of Canada for entrepreneurs should also be extended to organizations like Femmessor, to ensure that women have full access to these forms of financial assistance and can benefit from the coaching we can give them.
From the standpoint of the Canadian economy, if women and men participated equally in entrepreneurship, it would mean a potential injection of $150 billion in gross domestic product, or GDP—a 6% rise in the current forecast GDP over the next decade. That would be equivalent to adding a new financial services sector to the economy, making it a significant step forward.
To conclude, more than ever, diversity and inclusion should be seen as ways to leverage economic growth, innovation, sustainable development and social development. All the evidence shows that Canada's sustainable development and economic development will require greater participation by entrepreneurial women and underrepresented communities, together with a contribution to help them achieve their full potential.