Industries Where the Most Government Contracts are Awarded to WOBs
(About.com, Lahle A. Wolfe’s blog, 2008)
Expert in small business development and management, Lahle A. Wolfe, compares the total amount of government contracts awarded to women-owned businesses to the percentage awarded in industries where women own more than half of all the businesses. The blog was published in mid-2008 showing that the Small Business Administration’s efforts must focus on making the government allocate more federal contracts to women-owned businesses.
Topic: Should the new administration offer incentives for investing in women-owned businesses?
Category: Citizen Blog
What is it? A blog posted at About.com: women in business by Lahle A. Wolfe.
Publication Information: About.com:Women in Business, 2008
Author: Lahle A. Wolfe
Location: http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/wibtrendsandstatistics/a/mostcontracts.htm
Accessed: February 23, 2009. 13:30 PST
Support:
Lahle A. Wolfe- founder and CEO of IPump.org, Inc.
Trista Winnie- NuWire Investors
Margaret Smith -2007-2008 Chair of the Board of Directors Center for Women’s Business Research
Peter Galuszka- Fortune Small Business
Trista Winnie provides the data from the fiscal year 2006, which indicates that women-owned business received only 3.4% of all federal prime contracts. Margaret Smith outlines the industries in which the businesses are predominantly female. Peter Galuszka pinpoints the four underrepresented areas in which the SBA plans to focus their attention. The statistics provided by each of these people indicate that there are severe imbalances as to which business receive federal contracts.
Audience and Agenda: About.com provides guidance to the public in a variety of topics from acne to zoology. Experts in certain fields are employed to maintain blogs. The website is financed by advertisements which appear on each page. It also is sponsored by websites that share a common theme, and they are listed at the bottom of each page. According to Quantcast.com, About.com receives average monthly traffic of 47 million U.S. people, 55% of which are female.
Usefulness: This article shows that while women own 53.7% of businesses in the healthcare industry, these businesses only receive 7% of federal contracts. These statistics indicate that the problem concerning the lack of contracts for women-owned businesses extends beyond economic consequences and in fact is harming the health care industry because of inequitable contract distribution. The article indicates that the new administration must alter the infrastructure of the Small Business Administration in order to begin to achieve a more efficient way of making sure federal contracts are equally distributed among men- and women- owned businesses.
Works Cited:
http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/wibtrendsandstatistics/a/mostcontracts.htm
http://www.quantcast.com/about.com
Filed under: Citizen Sources, Source Notes
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