Women in Business - Everywoman: Grow Your Business.

Today I’m off to the Everywoman’s ‘Grow your business’ conference in Oxford. This event runs on an annual basis and takes place in several regions within the UK. Their national conference takes place in London on Wednesday 15 November 2006. See below for website and further details and next week I’ll report back on how it went in Oxford.

In the meantime, a few words of support from Meg Munn MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Women and Equality

- There are encouraging signs that many more of our new entrepreneurs are women: 36% of the newly self-employed are women compared to just 27% of those currently self-employed. Nearly a million women are self-employed and this number has increased by around 10% over the last four years.

However we know that women's enterprise in the UK is much lower than in some other countries, such as the US. Developing women's enterprise, encouraging that wealth-creating potential, is important for our economy. If the UK could achieve the same levels of female entrepreneurship as the US we would have at least half a million more businesses. The potential for the development of women entrepreneurs is huge and largely untapped.

More businesses would improve productivity, employment and prosperity. At the moment, women-owned businesses contribute about £70 billion to Gross Value Added; about 25% of the UK total, mainly from the growing service sector.

http://www.everywoman.co.uk/