Women over 50 are starting new businesses

With the unemployment rate up, many people are beginning new businesses, but there is another group of new entrepreneurs who have much different reasons for starting a new venture. I’m talking about woman over age 50.

This can seem like a crazy idea because it’s the time in life that society says women are supposed to slow down, play with their grandchildren and knit. Women are proving they can knit even if they haven’t slowed down!

According to Score, people age 55 and up represent the fastest growing group of self-employed. The majority of these are women.

In fact, the fastest growing group on Facebook over the last six months are women over the age of 55.

Here are a few more interesting statistics I grabbed from bizoffice.com.

• 70 percent of women business owners are financing their business with their credit cards and personal resources.
  
  
• Women-owned businesses have staying power; more than 40 percent have been in business for 12 years or more.

Beyond the statistics there is other data that is less measurable but more interesting. I am talking about what it is that drives women to begin a whole new venture at age 60. What makes women risk their life savings and where does their drive come from?

My guesses:

• Women spend their earlier adult years being a mother and doing what they need to do to support their family. When that ends, they have the space to express their own passion.
   
• Younger women want to make it in the world and are often driven to compete with men and their esteem comes from reaching success in their profession. This becomes less important after age 50. It becomes more important to do their own thing that has intrinsic meaning.
   
• Women want to work in their own way, their own time schedule and with full license to be creative and productive in their own way. In other words, they like the freedom of doing their own venture. They still want the work/life balance of traveling, spending time with family etc.
   
• Women are natural entrepreneurs great with relationships, networking, wanting to make a difference in the world.
   
• By the late 50’s women finally feel secure in themselves, are less concerned about whether everyone likes them or not and have huge wisdom from all those years where they did care!

Many women are starting their businesses from home offices, using their lifetime of skills and learning all about the world of technology at a ripe older age.