A report from the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) suggests that 18 per cent of small and medium-sized businesses are majority owned by women in Canada.

That is up from 15.6 per cent in 2017 and 16.8 per cent in 2020, a sign that the gap between women and men entrepreneurs is narrowing, according to a statement.

“Over the last few years, and thanks in part to the research of WEKH, which identifies what programs work well to support women entrepreneurs, there's been tremendous efforts from government, financial institutions and other stakeholders in the entrepreneurship ecosystem to introduce programs and policies to help with the pandemic recovery,” Nadine Spencer, CEO of the Black Business and Professional Association, said in a statement. “The Black Entrepreneurship Strategy is one example that I see is starting to yield results, but we must continue to take an intersectional lens when developing policy and support programs if we want Black, racialized, Indigenous and other populations of women entrepreneurs to succeed at the same rate.”

At a time when more than 50 per cent of business owners start with less than $5,000 in funding and accessing loans and grants can be difficult, programs launched for Black women and entrepreneurs are making an impact.

But Wendy Cukier, the report's lead researcher and founder of the Diversity Institute at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, said more needs to be done.

“We need innovative programs to support women and new ways of thinking about these investments,” Cukier said in a statement. “People think nothing of investing in high-risk technology ventures with failure rates exceeding 90 per cent, but it's hard for women to get even $1,000 to get their business started. We are undertaking research to help us better understand the impact of small investments on community economic development, sustainability, and inclusion.”

The report notes that more than 1,700 Black women entrepreneurs applied for the Rise Up Competition, which allows eight women to get $10,000 in funding.

It also suggests the majority of women-owned SMEs in Canada are significantly more likely to implement marketing innovations than men-owned businesses, at 26.1 per cent vs 9.8 per cent, respectively, according to a statement.

What’s more, Statistics Canada data on the ownership characteristics of SMEs owned by immigrants shows that in the South Asian, Black, and Chinese communities, women make up a higher proportion of entrepreneurs.

Read the full report here.