Can Women Benefit from President Obama's Job Summit?

RedTracker|  Forbes published a recap of women’s business issues raised at President Obama’s jobs summit. Read Scaling Up: Women-Owned Businesses Can echarge The Global Economy.

Read for an overview of stats on women-owned business in the US. Some quick bits that are new for us:

If women entrepreneurs in the U.S. started with the same capital as men entrepreneurs, they would add a  6 million jobs to the economy within five years—2 million of those in the first year alone, according to Babson College research.

Forbes writes that to assist women-owned businesses, help is needed in three areas: access to capital, the global supply chain and business networks that can help themscale.

Sounds good, but the federal contracting process has completely failed American women. Maine Senator Olympia Snowe is furious over the inability of the federal government to implement the five percent sourcing guidelines for women put in place 15 years ago.

With the exception of members of the Billion Dollar Roundtable, which spend more than $1 billion on purchasing from minority and women-owned businesses, less than 2.2% of large corporations’ procurement budgets and only 3.4% of federal government contracts go to women-owned businesses. via Forbes