KAUAI SMALL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CENTER WOMEN IN BUSINESS SEMINAR
November 2001

Before we discuss strategies to improve our chances to survive this economic downturn, I want to give you an overall picture of the status and trends of Hawaii women prior to the horrific tragedies of September 11 so we have an idea for benchmarking progress and give ourselves a reality check for issues that were really crisis before the crisis.

A woman’s economic contributions are critical to her family’s economic security, especially here where Hawaii’s families are heavily reliant on two or more incomes and over 68% of Hawaii’s women work fulltime. Policymakers like myself are acutely aware of the impact women have on each state’s economic prosperity for these simple reasons:

• Women owned businesses are the fastest growing segment in each of the fifty states
• Women owned business employ one in four U.S. company workers
• Women make 80% of consumer purchasing decisions
• Women are more than half of all voters
• Women are nearly half the workforce

In Hawaii:

• Between 1987 and 1992 the number of women-owned businesses grew 37.1%, somewhat lower than the national average of 43.1 percent
• By 1992 women owned 29,743 firms
• 49.9% of these businesses were in the service industry and the next highest proportion was 20.3% in retail
• Between the 1987 and 1992 period, gross receipts of Hawaii women owned businesses rose by 143.3%. This growth was substantially more than the increase of 87% for women owned firms nationally and the 34.9% average increase for all firms in the United States
• By 1999, the National Foundation of Women Business Owners estimated the number of women owned businesses in Hawaii to be 44,600 of the more than 9.1 million estimated for the entire United States

The status of a woman within her community is one of the best indicators of the quality of life of that community. Today, we are well aware that the most extreme example of this statement is the treatment of Afghani women under the Taliban regime.

Here are some overall findings about the status of women in Hawaii taken from a report published in 2000 by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research with contributions and input from the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women. Compared to the United States as a whole, Hawaii women:
• Rank first in the percent of non-elderly women with health insurance in 1997;
• Rank second for the ratio of women’s to men’s earnings;
• Rank third for women’s business ownership in 1992;
• Rank third for accessibility to reproductive and family planning services;
• Rank eleventh for women with four or more years of college;
• Rank seventeenth for labor force participation in 1998; and
• Rank eighteenth for median annual earnings in 1997;

However, there were some very troubling findings, such as:
• Almost 47% of single females with children in Hawaii are living in poverty in 1997;
• Hawaii ranks 50th among all the states for women’s voter turnout for the 1992 and 1996 elections combined;
• Hawaii ranks 49th among all the states for women’s voter registration
• Hawaii ranks 49th for women in managerial and professional occupations in 1998; and
• Women still lack many legal guarantees that would help them achieve equality with men.

As we discuss empowerment I believe it will be the process of identifying opportunities or issues we can control to be used to our advantage, then we must analyze what we cannot control and seek ways to mitigate or minimize the undesirable impacts.

I want to leave you with some final thoughts about the empowerment of women in our society. As more women have become doctors or taken on leadership roles in the medical industry, the health of women and children have become a higher national priority. As more women have become involved in criminal justice and law enforcement, there has been a greater recognition of the pervasiveness of domestic violence and more policies and programs to address it.

Today, we need to create the future for a clean, healthy and peaceful earth for all children of the world. If you think women are not empowered to help create this vision, let me tell you about the Greek story of Lysistrata. The Athenian women are all fed up with the Peloponnesian War. The barricade themselves in the Acropolis. They all go on a sex strike to force their husbands to vote for peace with Sparta. Now that’s empowerment!

District 14, East & North Kauai

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Women In Business
Hydrogen Partnering Meeting

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