Women business owners break record in Brazil – 07/03/2023 – Market

The scarcity of job openings in the field of education in the initial phase of the pandemic led Rafaela Azevedo de Jesus, 25, to open her own business in 2020.

A student of literature, the young woman at the time set up a vegan food delivery in the Bahian municipality of Alagoinhas (about 120 km from Salvador).

Since then, he has specialized in the field, formalized the company and started to plan the opening of a restaurant in a physical space. What was a “stop-gap” became entrepreneurship, according to the young woman.

“I want to make a living from my business”, says Rafaela, who is vegan and felt the lack of food options for this public in her city.

Stories like Rafaela’s find support in statistics. In the third quarter of 2022, the number of business owners reached 10.3 million in Brazil. This is the record level of a historical series that started in the third quarter of 2016.

The conclusion is from the study Female Entrepreneurship in Brazil in 2022. The analysis was produced by Sebrae (Brazilian Support Service for Micro and Small Companies) on the occasion of Women’s Day, celebrated this Wednesday (8).

The survey uses microdata from the Continuous PNAD (Continuous National Household Sample Survey), released by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).

Sebrae considers as business owners women who act as employers or who work on their own with or without CNPJ.

This means that the group ranges from women entrepreneurs planning to occupy a niche market to professionals who are committed to an activity due to lack of income and scarcity of opportunities.

Historically, it is the need that leads most women to open a business, according to Renata Malheiros, national coordinator of female entrepreneurship at Sebrae.

She claims that many workers follow this path after becoming a mother because they cannot find vacancies in the market that allow them to reconcile employment and childcare.

Malheiros points out that women continue to be burdened by domestic tasks in the country. The framework, she says, also prevents female entrepreneurs from dedicating more time to their businesses.

“Women are overloaded. We need to talk about the division of care work, day care, public policies”, says the coordinator.

In addition to the tight time, prejudice is another obstacle that business owners face in Brazil, according to Malheiros.

“The root of women’s additional challenges is cultural. We need to work to change the culture. It’s not easy, trivial, but it’s possible”, she points out.

In the specialist’s view, the improvement of this scenario involves the debate on the subject and concrete actions, including the definition of public policies.

Social entrepreneur Aline Odara, 36, also considers that need and lack of income are the factors that most lead women to invest in their own businesses.

“Most are out of necessity. We realize that there is a lack of public policies for productive inclusion in Brazil”, he assesses.

During the pandemic, Odara launched the Agbara Fund, an initiative that empowers and invests in black female entrepreneurs.

Since September 2020, more than 2,000 women in the country have been assisted by the project, whose headquarters are in São Paulo. One of them is Rafaela Azevedo de Jesus, quoted at the beginning of this article.

According to Odara, the fund is maintained by a network of around 200 individual donors and six institutional investors, including companies and entities. The initiative studies new forms of fundraising.

In Odara’s view, a combination of factors makes entrepreneurship difficult for black women. “The first is the feeling of loneliness, of doing it alone. We were able to mitigate that, because the fund created a network of women in Brazil”, she says.

“Another issue is the lack of emotional security, because, in our case, in addition to machismo, racism counts for a lot. There is also a lack of working capital. There is no credit for black women in this country”, she completes.

Businesswomen predominate in the service sector

Sebrae indicates that, in the third quarter of 2022, 53% of business owners were in the service sector. Commerce (27%), industry (13%) and agriculture (7%) come next.

The reopening of the service sector after the pandemic restrictions is one of the factors that stimulated the growth in the number of women at the head of businesses, according to Renata Malheiros, from Sebrae.

The study also lists activities with a female predominance. In these cases, women represent more than 60% of all business owners.

Hairdressers and beauty treatments, clothing trade (supplements) and catering services, buffet and prepared food are three highlights.

Trade in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and perfumery, tailor-made clothing, health professionals (except doctors and dentists), clothing (clothing), other personal service activities, other teaching activities and the manufacture of textile artifacts are also mentioned in the women’s list.

Men, in turn, make up the majority of business owners in building construction activities, passenger transport, specialized services for construction, repair of motor vehicles and cargo transport.

Delivery activities, repair of household objects, manufacturing of metal products, furniture manufacturing and IT (information technology) services are also among the male-dominated branches.

In the third quarter of 2022, the number of male business owners in the country was estimated at 19.7 million, according to Sebrae. The level is also a record in the historical series started in the third quarter of 2016, says the institution.

They still represent the largest share of business owners: 65.6% of the total. They, in turn, account for 34.4%.

The total number of business owners was estimated at around 30 million in the third quarter of 2022. It is yet another record in the historical series, according to Sebrae.