The National Association of Women Business Owners or NAWBO was founded in 1974 and moved its office to Washington D.C. soon after. It was instrumental in the 1970s and 1980s in lobbying Congress for women business owners to be treated the same way as men business owners.
This seems obvious, but it wasn’t at that time. First, since businesses are registered at the state level and the 50 states are quite different in some of their legislation; in many states women could not sign any financial transaction from a mortgage to a business loan unless the documents were co-signed by a man.
Second, when government agencies compiled statistics, they forgot about women owned businesses. It’s still possible to find 30 year old versions of statistics where women’s companies are dismissed as being small and involved only in crafts like making jewelry and ceramic objects. What began as HR 5050 (originating in the House of Representatives) acquired a majority of votes there and was also passed by the Senate before coming to President Ronald Reagan for the signature that would make the bill the law of the land. On October 28, 1988, he signed with representatives of NAWBO at his side.
That’s the background behind the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Business Act commemorated at the NAWBO Women’s Business Conference or WBC in Miami last month. Although I started my first company in 1990 – just two years after passage of the Women’s Business Act – I had no idea about the legislation that made it possible.
The organizers of WBC wanted to make sure that the 500 women attending the conference learned about the Women’s Business Act and the role of the pioneers from NAWBO who lobbied for passage of the Act throughout the country and in Washington DC.
They decided that the 45 speakers and panelists at WBC would each be interviewed at least a month before the conference. NAWBO members were asked to volunteer to do the interviews by phone, email, or Skype. I volunteered as well, but in the end I didn’t do any interviews; instead I edited all of them into a common format of 300-350 words.
The interviews became a major part of marketing the conference to potential attendees and sponsors. Links to groups of 10 interviews appeared on the email messages NAWBO began sending every few days to its huge list of members and supporters around the country and overseas. NAWBO partners with The International Alliance of Women so several women business owners from South America and the Caribbean attended. However, I didn’t see any from Europe, the Middle East, or the Far East. On my panel about doing business internationally, the focus was the Americas – I was the only one who had experience in Europe and the Gulf.
Unfortunately, some of the interviews were never published because we learned too late the cutoff point was September 15, less than three weeks before the opening of WBC. If I have the chance to do it again, I would start the interviews earlier – summer vacations were a problem – so that edited versions could begin to appear six weeks before the start of the conference.
It should also be possible to record each interview in video as well as text, something like mini-TED presentations to download from the NAWBO website (www.nawbo.org) or a special conference site for a brief look at the speakers and panelists. They were the reason why most of us attended WBC.
By Alma Kadragic
Photo by Jennifer Ohl
