LibGuides: Business Resources for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Entrepreneurship

Recommended Resources

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Entrepreneurship

There are documented additional barriers and hurdles that women, people of color, and other marginalized populations need to overcome that make it more difficult to create new businesses and start the path to entrepreneurship. Some of the most well known include finding seed money and investors, as well as additional hurdles.

Below are our recommended resources for learning about and identifying strategies for overcoming those hurdles.

Overview

We recommend the following research studies to get a full understanding of the role that race plays in entrepreneurship:

Books and ebooks

The following books and ebooks are all available directly from the University of Rochester

African American Entrepreneurs by Michelle Spain; J. Mark Munoz
ISBN: 9781606493595
Publication Date: 2018-03-22
African American entrepreneurs are key contributors to the American economy. Faced with numerous challenges, many African American entrepreneurs have learned to transcend tough obstacles, leverage resources, and strategically pursue opportunities to achieve business success. This book captures the stories and mindsets of contemporary African Americans in their quest for the American dream.
Implementing Supplier Diversity: Driver of Entrepreneurship by Porter, Kathey, K
ISBN: 9783319943947
Publication Date: 2019
This book provides an in-depth view of supplier diversity programs and how they have contributed to the meteoric rise of minority businesses. Incorporating expert advice from supplier diversity practitioners as well as empirical data, it looks at the emergence of supplier diversity programs, how to make them effective, and their future. Supplier diversity ensures an open and inclusive competition for contracts during the procurement process, and the use of vendors of different backgrounds fosters a better understanding of a diverse customer base. Over the last decade the number of minority-owned firms in the US has increased 38 per cent.
Minority Women Entrepreneurs by Mary Godwyn; Donna Stoddard
ISBN: 9780804774789
Publication Date: 2011-02-23
Minority women start new businesses in the U.S. at four times the rate of non-minority men and women. Though minority women entrepreneurs in the United States are thriving, their stories are very seldom told, and few think of minority women as successful entrepreneurs. Minority Women Entrepreneurs gives voice and visibility to this group of business owners.The second purpose of this book is to explain what makes these women different from the standard white, male business owners with whom most people are familiar. Through in-depth interviews and firsthand accounts from minority women entrepreneurs, the authors found that minority women use their outsider status to develop socially conscious business practices that support their communities in innovative and exciting ways. They reject the idea that business values are separate from personal values, and instead balance profits with social good and environmental sustainability. This pattern is repeated in statistical evidence from around the globe: women contribute a much higher percentage of their earnings to social good than do men. But, until now, there was no clear explanation of why. Using sociological and psychological theories, the authors explain the tendency for women, especially minority women, to create socially responsible businesses. The findings in this book suggest fresh solutions to economic inequality and humanistic alternatives to exploitative business policies. Herein lays a radically new, socially integrated model that can be used by businesses everywhere.
A Research Agenda for Women and Entrepreneurship by Patricia G. Greene (Editor); Candida G. Brush (Editor)
ISBN: 9781785365379
Publication Date: 2018-01-26
Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.This book looks at long-studied questions of identity from the perspective of women entrepreneurs, exploring ideas related to entrepreneurial identity for women and their businesses. The editors map out a vision for research on women and entrepreneurship and discuss aspiration, behaviors and confidence as key concepts that shape and enhance a woman's identity in the entrepreneurial process. A global collection of authors who are passionate about identity and women's entrepreneurship bring a variety of theoretical perspectives and quantitative methodologies to the table. Through a common framework of on women business owners and their businesses, they delve into social identity, start-ups, crowdfunding and context to set the groundwork for future research on entrepreneurship and gender.Advanced graduate students and researchers in the field of entrepreneurship will appreciate this focused exploration of a compelling topic, as will doctoral students and scholars of women's issues.

To locate additional books from our collections, we suggest the following search terms:

Entrepreneurship diversity
Entrepreneurship minority
Entrepreneurship women
Entrepreneurship African-Americans

Conferences and Events: 2020 and 2021

Conferences present the opportunity to see and hear the top thinkers, researchers, and practitioners in the field-and many make information accessible even for those that do not attend. For events previously held, you can visit the conference site to locate the names and contact of past speakers, and often download PowerPoints, audio, or video of selected presentations. You can also look to see if there will be another event held next year. For upcoming events, you can also locate experts, and get a sense of the key and emerging issues by reviewing the upcoming talks and presentations

Previously Held Events

National Association of Women Business Ownders
September 21-23 2020
United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO): Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium 2020
United Status Patent & Trademark Office May 3 2020
Women in Entrepreneurship Conference 2020
Cornell University; March 5 2020

Upcoming Conferences

Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Summit
Black Enterprise virtual conference to be held Nov 12–13, 2020.

Recommended UR Databases

ProQuest ABI/Inform
Business Source Premier
Factiva

For tips on searching these databases, see the "Database Search Tips" box below

Open Web Searching

In addition to our own databases, Google Scholar can also be a fruitful source for finding scholarly articles on diversity and entrepreneurship. Here are a few examples of recent articles you can find there:

Closing Diversity Gaps in Innovation: Gender, Race, and Income Disparities in Patenting and Commercialization of Inventions. H Fechner, MS Shapanka - Technology & Innovation, 2018
Aldawood, Almas, "Women Leaders in Social Entrepreneurship: Leadership Perception, And Barriers" (2020). Educational and Organizational Learning and Leadership Dissertations.
Women Entrepreneurship: A Systematic Review to Outline the Boundaries of Scientific Literature; Front. Psychol., 17 July 2020 |

Consider doing an Advanced Search on Google Scholar to better target your search results. In the image below, you will see that the word "entrepreneurship" was inserted in the "all of the words" box; while the words: diversity minority "african american" and women were entered in the "at least one of the words" box. In the "Return articles dated between," we specified a time range of 2012-2020

Government Agencies: Surveys, Reports, Services

The U.S. government is one of the best sources for locating data, reports, studies, and policy papers and recommendations on DEI issues and entrepreneurship. Below are a few of the most recent and prominent resources.

TIP: To locate additional resources on this topic from the US government, we recommend using the following search on Google:

site:.gov entrepreneurship diversity OR women OR inclusion barriers

National Women’s Business Council
Understanding the Landscape: Access to Capital for Women Entrepreneurs
Small Business Administration: Latino Business Ownership.
Contributions and Barriers for U.S.-born and Immigrant LatinoEntrepreneurs
US Bureau of the Census: Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons (SBO)
The Survey of Business Owners (SBO) provides the only comprehensive, regularly collected source of information on selected economic and demographic characteristics for businesses and business owners by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status.
US Department of Commerce: Minority Business Development Agency.
The U.S. Department of Commerce, Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) is the only federal agency solely dedicated to the growth and global competitiveness of minority business enterprises
US Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
21st Century Barriers to Women’s Entrepreneurship: Majority Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

Management Consultants

An alternative source to consider when researching diversity and entrepreneurship are management consultants and trainers who often write articles, advisories, and strategies as part of their mission to enhance start ups and minority owned businesses. Below is the name of one such organization, which focuses specifically on helping the LBGQ+ population start new businesses.

StartOut
StartOut’s mission is to increase the number, diversity, and impact of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs and amplify their stories to drive the economic empowerment of the community.
more...less...
See also on the site a link to the recent Pride Economic Index that measures the impact of LBGTQ+ businesses on their community

Research Reports

To find additional reports in addition to those we provide below, we suggest the following keyword search on Google.

As with all Google searches, you will want to experiment with your keywords to end up with as many relevant reports as possible. Note that this search requires that Google return only PDF documents, which helps ensure that these will be substantive reports.

diversity OR "african americans" OR women OR inclusion OR minorities "entrepreneurship" filetype:pdf

and to limit reports only from governmental sites, you can modify the above search as follows:

site:.gov diversity OR "african americans" OR women OR inclusion OR minorities "entrepreneurship" filetype:pdf

Social Media Influencers

The below sites will all direct you to dozens of social media influencers in the area of diversity and entrrpreneurship. In addition, a timely article that is worth reading is "Black Influencers Respond to Brands Black Lives Matter Posts."

Locating Women and People of Color Owned Companies

There are several databases and free on the Web resources that will permit you to generate a list of women and people of color owned businesses. Here are our recommendations and instructions for generating such a list

UR Library Databases

ReferenceUSA

Go to the U.S. Businesses Database and select Advanced Search. In the Executives options select Executive Gender to filter for Male or Female or Executive Ethnicity to filter for one or more listed ethnicities. Alternatively, when you have a list of search results, if you select Download > Custom you can add the Executive Gender and Executive Ethnicity fields to the list of columns to export.

Open Web Database

CrunchBase

Crunchbase, a free database of hundreds of thousands of start-ups, venture funded and small tech companies, has introduced a feature that includes a filter that permits users to generate a list of companies that are led or founded by Blacks, Latinex or other diverse populations You can link directly to the site here: