Innovation Conversations: Q&A with Minister Mary Ng

At an event celebrating International Women’s Day in Coquitlam, B.C, Small Business and Export Promotion Minister Mary Ng announced the first successful recipients of the Women Entrepreneurship Fund, a novel investment stream that provides $20 million directly to women whose businesses show strong potential to grow. The program will award grants of up to a hundred thousand dollars each to 216 women entrepreneurs. The fund operates alongside the $85-million Women’s Ecosystem Fund, which provides training, mentorship opportunities, and other business-development opportunities to women entrepreneurs.

The two funding programs are part of the federal government’s $2-billion Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES), which seeks to bring equity to Canada’s SMEs — of which only 16% are majority women-owned — by doubling the number of women-owned businesses by 2025. “It's not only the right thing to do, but there’s a great return on investment on this,” Minister Ng told RE$EARCH MONEY in an interview ahead of the announcement, citing a study from McKinsey indicating that solving the problem of gender equality could add up to $150 billion of incremental GDP to Canada's economy in 2026. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

RE$EARCH MONEY: What criteria were you looking for when you were choosing successful candidates for the Women Entrepreneurship Fund?

Minister Ng: We were looking for women-owned or women-led businesses that were minimum two years old and really had an opportunity to grow. So they are already putting their own sweat equity into building their business, and this is an opportunity for us to see them grow more.

[rs_quote credit="Mary Ng" source="Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion"] There are inherent barriers that are in the way for female entrepreneurs [and] business leaders. This is an aggressive strategy that is intended to put significant investment behind women entrepreneurs and to have a deliberate focus with other policies that complement this investment strategy. [/rs_quote]

R$: The Women's Entrepreneurship Strategy website points out that women entrepreneurs are less likely to seek debt and equity financing and more likely to be rejected or receive less money. What can programs like this one do to help women access financing and capital?

MN: The file that I have is Small Business and Export Promotion, and I often say that a key part of my job is [to be] the Minister of Promotion. It's to let all small businesses know — and particularly women entrepreneurs who have these inherent challenges — that there is support available. The $20 million is one part of it, but there are other parts to our $2 billion plan that enable women to get both the support and the financing that they need in order to be successful. The $85-million Women's Ecosystem Fund levels the playing field for women entrepreneurs so that they feel comfortable getting access to this funding.

I often say as I meet businesses around the country [that] it isn't just about the investment dollars that we're putting forward. It's about the other policies that this government has made very deliberately to support the success of women entrepreneurs. Whether it’s parental leave and allowing a female entrepreneur or business leader to say, Look, I'm going to start my family. She could do that and share the parental-leave responsibilities. Affordable childcare is something we deliberately put investment in, because if a woman is able to start a family, have her children looked after through affordable childcare, and then keep going, she will be successful.

R$: You have said that you are looking for companies that are ready to grow. Are you going to be measuring the impact of this investment? And what kind of indicators or success measures are you going to be looking for, in terms of growth?

[rs_related_article slug="economic-strategy-tables-set-the-bar-for-achieving-global-competitiveness-in-six-key-sectors"]MN: Our economic tables have told us that, in six or seven sectors in the country, we absolutely have the Canadian excellence for scaling. So through the work that [special advisor on scaling up small and medium-sized enterprises] Sheldon Levy is going to be doing, we are going to take a practical approach ... to take a number of companies through that scale-up. And absolutely there will be women-led companies in there.

We have also invested in the Women's Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub. And the reason it's really important to make an investment in something called a knowledge hub is because I couldn't tell you the statistics in any real way right now, with respect to the successes or the gaps [for] women entrepreneurs. So there is an academic leadership team led by Ryerson University, with a number of universities across the country, and their sole job is to create this research capability that's going to look at the data that we need, so that we can understand it and therefore make better policy choices.

[rs_related_article slug="ised-announces-new-women-entrepreneurship-knowledge-hub-to-be-led-by-ryerson"]

R$: There are a lot of positive indicators that the trend is moving in the right direction, but gender inequality is still prevalent. There are about 600,000 women in management positions in Canada in 2017 compared to about twice that number of men, who also earn a higher wage. What's it going to take to get the rest of the way?

MN: In 2018, the New York Times reported there are more guys with the name James as CEO's of fortune 500 companies than there are women. Male entrepreneurs who make pitches for capital are successful 68% of the time. For a woman entrepreneur making that exact same pitch, it’s 32%. So there are inherent barriers that are in the way for female entrepreneurs or female business leaders. This is an aggressive strategy that is intended to put significant investment behind women entrepreneurs and to have a deliberate focus with other policies that complement this investment strategy. The goal has got to be that we have more women entrepreneurs because Canada's economy benefits and jobs get created. I think we're doing all the right things and we just need to stay focused to get the work done.

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