Today, Daniya and I are at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, where we are presenting a draft of WISER’s Self-Employment Dashboard as part of the Institute for Economic Equity Research Series.
The discussion about entrepreneurship usually revolves around scalable businesses and ideas. I believe this perspective is flawed for several reasons. First, it assumes that solopreneurs do not require the same skills to run a sustainable business. Second, it downplays the contributions of solopreneurs. Table 1 shows that 6 percent of the labor force is self-employed with an unincorporated business.
Table 1. Distribution of Self-Employed Labor Force by Ethnicity, Race and Sex
Source: 2023 Annual Social Economic Supplement, Current Population Study, United States Bureau of the Census. Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V11.0
Women were 40 percent of unincorporated businesses and 34 percent of incorporated businesses (see Table 2). An objective is to encourage entrepreneurship centers and chambers of commerce to support all entrepreneurs, regardless of their business’s scalability.
Table 2. Distribution of Self-Employed by Ethnicity, Race and Sex
Source: 2023 Annual Social Economic Supplement, Current Population Study, United States Bureau of the Census. Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V11.0
This project is a collaborative effort between WISER, the Economics Department at Spelman College, and the Center for Black Entrepreneurship. Daniya Edmond and Princess Dandoo Young, senior economics majors at Spelman, worked on the dashboard as their independent study.
