Devoted to women of color in business

I love numbers, and even though Mark Twain has told us "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," I still think that solid, documented research gives us a better perception of what's going on (rather than gut intuition or feelings).

As women of color in business, we must always be aware of the numbers, including where we stand, where we're headed, and where we want to end up ;-)

Robert W. Fairlie http://econ.ucsc.edu/~fairlie/ is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he's a terrific researcher on minorities, wealth creation, business ownership, and self-employment, He  helps publish the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial  Activity, through the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation www.kauffman.org which has some really interesting items for you to ponder.

Pat yourself on the back if you're an entrepreneur: there are about 290 of us out of every 100,000.

The key findings for 2005 are:

• In 2005, an average of 0.29 percent of the adult population (or 290 out of 100,000 adults) created a new business each month, representing approximately 464,000 people per month.
  
  
• The Kauffman Index rate of entrepreneurial activity for women did not change from 2004 to 2005, remaining stable at 0.24 percent.
  
  
• African Americans were the only major ethnic or racial group to experience an increase in the rate of entrepreneurial activity in 2005.
  
  
• The Latino rate of entrepreneurial activity remained higher than the white, non-Latino rate of 0.29 percent.
  
  
• Immigrants continued to have a substantially higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than native-born individuals. However, the immigrant rate of entrepreneurial activity declined from 0.41 percent in 2004 to 0.35 percent in 2005.
  

• Delaware exhibits the lowest rates of entrepreneurial activity (160 per 100,000 adults starting new businesses each month)
  
  
• Vermont appears to have the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity (550 per 100,000 adults creating new businesses each month)
  
  
• Entrepreneurship activities are highest in the Mountain and Pacific states: the highest levels are found in Vermont, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho; the lowest levels are found in Delaware, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

More info at www.kauffman.org.

Note: The Kauffman Index uses matched data from the 1996–2005 Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine changes in the rate of entrepreneurial activity in the United States over the last decade.