Women-owned businesses generate $68,000 less revenue than men’s: survey

onpoli:

The wage gap between men and women has been long-standing – with women
on average making 74 cents for every dollar of annual salary made by
men, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data – but research
from by PayPal Canada and consulting firm Barraza and Associates
suggests that this dynamic also applies to those who own small-and-
medium sized businesses as well.

Businesses owned by women generate an average of $68,000 less revenue
than men who run similar businesses, representing a gap of 58 per cent,
according to the online survey of 1,000 Canadian small and medium-sized
businesses between Jan. 26 and Feb. 28.

One barrier to growth for women-owned businesses is access to capital,
the survey suggested. Roughly 53 per cent of women-owned businesses with
an e-commerce component said it was “easy” for their company to get
business credit to grow their business, falling short of the 67 per cent
of men who reported getting loans with ease, the survey found.

The Liberal government has prioritized gender equality and increased
participation in the workforce. Among the many initiatives aimed at this
goal as part of its latest budget, Ottawa has allocated $1.4 billion
over three years from the Business Development Bank in new financing for
female entrepreneurs and $105 million over five years to help the
regional development agencies support women-led businesses.

In addition to the financing options offered, there are also advisory services available for female business owners. Other funding has been put towards getting more women into the workforce, especially in construction and male-dominated trades. However, the Liberals opted against increasing childcare funding in this year’s budget, even though they’re fully aware that high childcare costs are a barrier to employment for women.

hi! i saw your post about men being exhausting and like yes? but not all men. I’m male and i like to help out at local shelters, the community garden, im an advocate and supporter for the lgbt community. im a feminist and against people who think trump is doing good things, and much more. dont let men set a precedent for what masculinity is. there are good guys out there, i promise. im sorry if this was rude in any way, i didn’t intend for it to be like that.

gardnerhill:

veganconnor:

so. i think there’s a good chance this was a joke. i lost my mind laughing when i first got it. but also? this is exactly how men talk, so i’m gonna break it down seriously.

i made that post after dinner with my friend’s family. his dad, let’s call him john, was belittling his wife so she wasn’t talking much and he’d made a few jabs about his son’s painted nails so his son was kind of wilting. john’s a nice guy, smart guy, really likes me & thinks i’m smart. i was pretty much carrying all the emotional labor at that dinner–trying to make my friend and his mom feel comfortable while also engaging with john. we were making conversation about lots of things, it wasn’t a particularly controversial or heated discussion at really any point in time. again, john’s a cool guy–he’s liberal and progressive and knows that i’m a lesbian and all sorts of nice things. he works for a bigggg banking company–i don’t wanna say which one, but you’d know the name. we were talking about #metoo and he starts talking about how sexual harassment isn’t really an issue where he works.

three hours before he said this, a man in times square had grabbed my boob. at a restaurant i worked at, a rapist who worked there got my number off the scheduling app and would text me vile things while we were both working to make me uncomfortable. he’d also touch my ass every shift but always managed to pretend like it was an accident. it wasn’t. my best friend, who was also at dinner with us, worked at her moms law firm when she was 17, and the man across from her had a countdown on his whiteboard to the day she turned 18 and every day he would look at her as he changed the number. i’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times outside of these instances, and so has she.

but other men don’t see these things.

and this man looks at me, and tells me sexual harassment doesn’t happen, because he doesn’t see it. and here’s the thing: that’s not why i’m mad. i’m not mad because he didn’t know.

i’m mad because i know this man. he is my friend’s father, he is my father, he is my uncles, he is my professors, he is my cousins, and my bosses, and my colleagues. i know how you have to talk to these men. it’s a game. and you have to play along whether you want to or not, because they won’t hear a word you say if you don’t.

here’s how the game works: john talks about everything like he’s the authority on the matter, because he can’t get it through his brain that someone, especially someone who is not a man, could possibly know something he doesn’t. so john starts talking about things very confidently. and because nobody knows everything, he gets a lot of things wrong. things that i refuse to let him be wrong about. so if i want to change john’s mind, if i want him to hear my point of view, i have to speak to him in the only way he will listen. i have to be, above all, pleasant. john has been taught for years to laugh at a woman’s anger, so if any hint of indignation sneaks into my voice, he won’t take me seriously any more and i’ll lose him entirely. i have to smile and laugh a little and be charming. but i also have to be articulate. i have to make sure i sound intelligent or else he’ll dismiss me as a stupid teenage girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. but i also can’t sound too intelligent because if he starts feeling threatened by my intelligence he’ll get defensive. (sidenote! he has a tiny dick.) so it’s quite a complicated game but i’m good at it. in fact, i’m one of the best. so here i am, carefully navigating the best way to hold this man’s hand and babysit him as i give him a kindergarten level course on sexual assault in the workplace, while also not letting him realize that i’m having to condescend to him because his brain is as tiny as his dick, and can only handful little bits of new information spoonfed to him like applesauce. i have to make it sound like i think he is not only smart, but smarter than me. i have to scatter in little phrases like, “in my experience” or “i could be wrong” and constantly undermine myself, even when speaking on a topic i am incredibly well-versed in, because i have to suggest that i think he is smarter than me or else he won’t deem me worthy of his attention.

i’m good at it. i play the little fucking game and before i know it, i’ve got john here nodding along and acting like he agreed with what i’m saying all along, acting like he came up with it, acting like he DIDN’T totally contradict what i just told him minutes before. but since he didn’t come up with it, he’ll likely interrupt me before i even get to the end of my point and say something totally misinformed and now i’m trying to educate him on both of the things he got wrong but before i can even do that he’s interrupting me again and now there’s THREE things i’ve gotta teach this guy without him catching on to the fact that i’m teaching him.

now. here’s the best part about the game. it’s soul-shatteringly dehumanizing. to disregard your own trauma, your own emotion, your own incredibly valid anger that you have fought and fought and fought to believe you have a right to feel, to tone down your beliefs in order to make them more palatable to someone who is this deeply ignorant, to force yourself to giggle and be charming as you discuss the thing that has ripped you into shreds, to ignore how triggering it is to even breach this topic in conversation, to be complicit in making yourself small in order to get your point across, to look into the eyes of a man who has, unwittingly, because of his ignorance, enabled other men to engage in this same behavior–it turns a dinner conversation into a thing that is traumatizing in it’s own right.

and i feel obligated to put myself through this because of my privilege, because as an attractive, white twenty year old, i can hold this man’s attention better than a massive portion of the population, who he likely wouldn’t give the time of day to. i refuse to let him live his life unchallenged, so i do what i have to do to make myself heard.

and i feel the repercussions of this so strongly i dissociate more viciously than i have in weeks and lose all memory of a solid 3 hours of my life after this conversation.

and i come on here, and post: men are useless and exhausting. because i am angry at what men have done to me. at what they continue to do to me. at what i must do to myself in order to force them to wake up and realize what other men are doing to me and to please, for the love of god, MAKE IT STOP.

and i get this message from you, a dumbass who’s got his head shoved so far up his own asshole that it’s about to come back up through his esophagus, assuming you know what i’m talking about. assuming you know more than me about men and about my experiences with them, about why i made this post. assuming that because you’re not the scum of the fucking earth and because you do three good things, it somehow balances out the treatment i have received for years from men, and makes my anger towards them, and my hatred of them: unjust. and my post wasn’t even me being angry! it was me being exhausted!!!!! if i’m tired of men, why the fuck would you, “a male” deem it at all appropriate to come near me, to send me a message, to engage with me at all? leave me alone! you know nothing!

and as much as i thought this was a joke at first, the more i read the message the more i’m convinced that it was written by a man, because even a girl pretending to be a man as a joke wouldn’t manage to sound this fucking stupid. i have dozens of stories exactly like this over the course of at least 10 years of my life. i know more than you. and this isn’t FUCKING about you. if you weren’t useless and exhausting, you would have happily scrolled by and went on with your night. but by sending me this message you proved yourself to be IMPRESSIVELY: useless and exhausting. shut the fuck up for about 3-4 years. you might learn something. also, read men explain things to me by rebecca solnit. she says all this better than i do.

#NotAllMen? How very nice of you dear but shut the godDAMN FUCK UP because #YesAllWomen.

If you speak in an angry way about what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people, what does he call it? Emotionalism. Pick up on that. Here the man has got a rope around his neck and because he screams, you know, the cracker that’s putting the rope around his neck accuses him of being emotional. You’re supposed to have the rope around your neck and holler politely, you know. You’re supposed to watch your diction, not shout and wake other people up— this is how you’re supposed to holler. You’re supposed to be respectable and responsible when you holler against what they’re doing to you. And you’ve got a lot of Afro-Americans who fall for that. They say, “No, you can’t do it like that, you’ve got to be responsible, you’ve got to be respectable.” And you’ll always be a slave as long as you’re trying to be responsible and respectable in the eyesight of your master; you’ll remain a slave. When you’re in the eyesight of your master, you’ve got to let him know you’re irresponsible and you’ll blow his irresponsible head off.

And again you’ve got another trap that he maneuvers you into. If you begin to talk about what he did to you, he’ll say that’s hate, you’re teaching hate. Pick up on that. He won’t say he didn’t do it, because he can’t. But he’ll accuse you of teaching hate just because you begin to spell out what he did to you. Which is an intellectual trap—because he knows we don’t want to be accused of hate.

And the average Black American who has been real brain-washed, he never wants to be accused of being emotional. Watch them, watch the real bourgeois Black Americans. He never wants to show any sign of emotion. He won’t even tap his feet. You can have some of that real soul music, and he’ll sit there, you know, like it doesn’t move him.

And then you go a step farther, they get you again on this violence. They have another trap wherein they make it look criminal if any of us, who has a rope around his neck or one is being put around his neck—if you do anything to stop the man from putting that rope around your neck, that’s violence. And again this bourgeois Negro, who’s trying to be polite and respectable and all, he never wants to be identified with violence. So he lets them do anything to him, and he sits there submitting to it nonviolently, just so he can keep his image of responsibility. He dies with a responsible image, he dies with a polite image, but he dies. The man who is irresponsible and impolite, he keeps his life. That responsible Negro, he’ll die every day, but if the irresponsible one dies he takes some of those with him who were trying to make him die.

Malcolm X

The traps of racism.

Source: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/malconafamhist.html

(via disciplesofmalcolm)

This shit is real familiar, isn’t it? So for all the white people who wanna roll up on me and other folk who they have deemed “SJ bloggers” and try and attack out humanity like we have no clue what tactics they’re using…please realize this: Malcom X done seent yo ass before you were even born. And if you don’t think this is basic knowledge to us, think again.

(via thinkspeakstress)

I’ve said it before and I’ll always say it. IF YOU COME AT ME, I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME. And this shit is so old your fucking grandma was being racist in the same way before your dumb cracker ass was born.

This is YOU.

THIS IS YOU.

(via crackerhell)

i literally will never not reblog this

(via smallrevolutionary)

Don’t confused ‘oppression’ with ‘first world problems’, it’s a rookie error among feminists.

thehenaproject:

cherrispryte:

feministbatwoman:

Wow, okay buddy, you’re BEGGING for a takedown here.

First world problems? Not a thing. People who say shit like “first world problems” are massive racist, imperialist, dismissive assholes.

If you’re ever tempted to say “first world problems,” do me a favor, and pull down a map. Tell me EXACTLY where the “third world” is. Make sure you correctly identify Switzerland as part of the third world, and Turkey as part of the First World. Don’t forget that Djibouti is a part of the first world.

Literally sit down and learn what “third world” means and why people from nonwestern nations think it’s a total bullshit term.

Second: you think people in the so-called third world don’t care about shit like makeup, and love, and technology? You think they don’t care about internet harassment? You think women over there don’t care about street harassment? You think they don’t care about fashion and clothes? You think they don’t care about music and video games?

Because THEY DO.

Right now, there is a woman in burundi teaching herself how to do a cut-crease eyeshadow look. Guaranteed.

“Third world” nations have fashion shows and fashion magazines. They care about street harassment. They care about the internet. They play video games. They know more about anime than your sorry ass every will. And the idea of “first world problems,” which makes it sound like all women in “third world” nations are dealing with starvation, rape, war, acid attacks etc.

Is bullshit.

Rank.

Bullshit.

Women in Iran spend shitloads of money on makeup. Women in the DRC don’t just care about rape. Rape – the ONE THING westerners can be expected to know about women in Congo-Kinshasa – ranks NUMBER FOUR on the list of issues women in Congo want addressed. Political participation is number 1. Economic empowerment is number 2. Women in India are passionate about information technology, and you know what they hate? Coming to the United States, where Indian women in STEM are suddenly considered LESS GOOD than their male colleagues. My friends in Senegal taught ME how to download movies off the internet. Zimbabwe has a fashion week.

As Teju Coal points out:

“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion’s technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is—quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.”

95% of the people who use bullshit expressions like “First world problems” have NO IDEA what life is like for people in the so-called third world. You just like sitting there derailing.

And for the record? As a white, western feminist, DAMN RIGHT I concentrate on issues in the United States. Because when white western feminists try to “save” women outside the west? We do a SHIT job of it. We’re the ones who bowl over actual congolese women, and what THEY want, and say that the #1 issue affecting them is rape. We become arms of the imperialist patriarchal complex.

Classic example: the guy who was ruling Egypt for the British got british feminists to help him in his anti-headscarf campaign in Egypt. Why did he hate headscarves? Because he wanted to *break the spirit* of Egyptians. Not because he gave a shit about women’s rights.
How do I know that?
Because he was the head of the anti-women’s-suffrage group in England.

When women who live outside the west do awesome things, I will signal-boost them, and I will do whatever they think I can do to help. But I follow their lead. Because these are THEIR issues, and THEY know what matters to them. Not me.

FINALLY: My problems are not trivial. My problems are not bullshit. My problems are not to be dismissed with your racist, imperialist logic. Dress codes and makeup and music and books and video games MATTER. They matter to me. They matter to my life.

So fuck you.

And fuck your assumptions.

And maybe consider that YOUR first world problem?
Is that you can’t “see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”

::stands up and applauds this response::

Have I blogged this before? Still bears repeating.

talix18:

thebeeskidneys:

the-deep-woods:

So I just read this article about how people end up fucking up whatever task they’re doing when they feel like they’re being watched. Scientists have discovered that the sense of being observed actually SHUTS OFF a part of the brain, the inferior parietal cortex.

Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, “ugly”, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?

Like talk about a fucking handicap.

Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.

Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop. Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around. Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldn’t hear because he was so goddamn far away.

I wonder what it does to women to have this constant source of stress hanging over us, each and every day, knowing we are being scrutinized and examined no matter what we’re doing. I wonder how many more accomplishments, life-changing discoveries, inventions, etc would have been achieved by women if we didn’t have this constant brain-handicap imposed on us by men.

This feeling of being watched extends even when we’re alone and affects our abilities- here’s a study where women took a math test while in a bathing suit and performed significantly worse than women fully dressed, even though all the women were alone when taking the test. The men in bathing suits and the men fully-dressed had no significant difference in performance. It is a major fucking handicap.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247434408_That_swimsuit_becomes_you_Sex_differences_in_self-objectification_restrained_eating_and_math_performance_Correction_to_Fredrickson_et_al_1998

(I don’t remember how to make a cleaner link on my phone, sorry)

This is AMAZING. It never occurred to me that “Observing a thing changes that thing” includes the eye of the male gaze.

“My female boss is mean to me at work” is not the same thing as centuries of institutionalized, systemic discrimination. If “beautiful women can get whatever they want,” then why haven’t we elected one president yet? “Sexism against both genders is wrong” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what sexism is. Any individual of any gender can be prejudiced or discriminate on a face-to-face level, but only one gender faces the glass ceiling, the ongoing, legalized regulation of their bodies, the significant wage gap for doing the same type of work, the deeply-engrained and consistently reinforced stereotypes about their being less aggressive, less capable and less intelligent, and countless other obstacles.

“Men’s Rights Activists” and the New Sexism | Opine Season (via kuanios)

coocoolah:

“American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and … labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”

— bell hooks

me-and-bobby-mcgeee:

“If you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. For X please insert words like ‘anger,’ ‘ambition,’ ‘loudness,’ ‘stubbornness,’ ‘coldness,’ ‘ruthlessness.’”

—Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

carys-virago:

I often hear people say that men are shamed for showing emotion (this is correct and I’m not denying it), whilst it’s considered acceptable or even positive for women to show emotion. This idea that women are expected to show emotion, or are praised for doing so, or gain any social capital that men don’t from expressing emotion is completely untrue.

Women’s emotions are utterly mocked, demeaned, disregarded and ultimately used to silence and dismiss us. People claim that women’s emotions make us irrational, inferior, and less capable of responsibility. Women are denied positions of power, due to the belief that their ‘emotions’ will get in the way. Women were subjected to medical abuse with diagnoses like ‘hysteria’ for displaying emotion. Our emotion is mocked, pathologized, and ultimately used to demean and oppress us.

‘Being allowed to show emotion’ is not a ‘privilege’ that women have over men.

brightquietude:

This reminded me of a study I read about in Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender:

“Kristi Klein and Sara Hodges used an empathic accuracy test in which participants watched a video of a woman talking about her failure to get a high enough score on an exam to get into the graduate school she wanted to attend. When the feminine nature of the empathic accuracy test was highlighted by asking participants for sympathy ratings before the empathic accuracy test, women scored significantly better than men. But a second group of women and men went through exactly the same procedure but with one vital difference: they were offered money for doing well. Specifically, they earned $2 for every correct answer. This financial incentive levelled the performance of women and men, showing that when it literally ‘pays to understand’ male insensitivity is curiously easily overcome.“ (Emphasis mine.)

(An endnote also states that “Men also scored equivalently to women when the sympathy rating was requested after the empathic accuracy test.”)

The passage goes on to add

“You can also improve men’s performance by inviting them to see a greater social value in empathising ability. Cardiff University psychologists presented undergraduate men with a passage titled ‘What Women Want’. The text, complete with bogus references, then went on to explain that contrary to popular opinion ‘non-traditional men who are more in touch with their feminine side’ are regarded as more sexually desirable and interesting by women, not to mention more likely to leave bars and clubs in the company of one. Men who read this passage performed better on the empathic accuracy task than did control men (to whom the test was presented in a nothing-to-do-with-gender fashion) or men who had been told that the experiment was investigating their alleged intuitive inferiority.“

In other words: men aren’t necessarily worse at sensing and understanding others’ feelings than women are; it’s just that quite a few of them don’t feel the need to put for the effort unless it profits them in some way… and perhaps don’t want to show too much empathy, because doing so would make them feel less masculine/manly.