Welcome to our #AskACPA feature where we answer financial, accounting and business questions.
Question: As a woman small business owner, what goals should I have for my small business this year?
New year goals are not just for individuals. They’re also for businesses looking to continue to grow, expand and do well in the future. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many, if not most of the businesses impacted are, unsurprisingly, women-owned small businesses. According to a 2020 survey by the U.S Chamber of Commerce, women-owned small businesses have been more significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic than their male counterparts. Additionally, these businesses also have less optimistic revenue prospects, among general fragile recovery prospects for all business owners.
More than ever in recent history, women entrepreneurs, despite their numerous achievements even in the midst of this global health crisis, are faced with a tough battle ahead. Hence the need to set and commit to solid future goals. To keep things simple yet effective, here are three goals women small business owners can shoot for as we usher in a brand new year:
Own your accounting and financial processes
One of the biggest misconceptions and mistakes committed by small business owners is to neglect their accounting and financial processes. Proper accounting and finances are the foundations and the language of healthy businesses. As such, when small business owners do not proactively take ownership of their accounting and finances, or relinquish them entirely to others’ control (even if these are financial experts), they also relinquish effective control and ownership of their businesses.
This is all the more important for female small business owners, who face exponentially larger barriers including funding limitations. The key here is to get familiar with your most basic accounting and financial information first, such as the amount of revenues and expenses for the period to start. Understanding how the business operates in terms of its cash receipts and expenditures, and being able to own its financial story and be accountable for it, is crucial.
Create systems and processes
Running a small business is A LOT of work! Running a small business and staying on top of your accounting and finances is even MORE work! This is why it’s crucial, especially for women small business owners, who also wear many other hats such as working moms and caregivers among others, to create systems and processes to efficiently and effectively track their finances.
Using apps such as Quickbooks or Freshbooks, as well as creating efficient workflows for invoice, revenue and expense tracking, can go a long way to save time, energy and costly business mistakes.
Commit to continuous accounting and financial education
Financial literacy is extremely important for female entrepreneurs, who are most often at the helm of businesses that are disproportionately impacted by lack of funding and scarcity of financial resources. While this gap largely stems from structural and societal This is why it is crucial for female business owners to work at bridging this gap through continuous accounting and financial education through books such as “Million Dollar Women: the Essential Guide for Female Entrepreneurs” by Julia Pimsleur, formal programs, as well as mentoring, and accounting apps such as Quickbooks.
Overall, the importance of setting clear, defined and effective business goals as small business owners cannot be overstated. By keeping these goals simple and actionable, focusing on priorities such as owning your accounting and finances, creating efficient systems and processes and investing in continuous financial education, women-owned small businesses have better chances to succeed in the new year.
What goals are you setting for your small business?
If there is any time in recent memory that has marked working motherhood, it is definitely the global COVID-19 health pandemic of the past couple of years. Not only have working mothers been at the forefront of this crisis, carrying the brunt of it on the work and personal front, what with the advent of remote work, the unequal distribution of household chores and lack of childcare, they are also redefining with their choices the very meaning behind “working motherhood”.
While some working moms are choosing to spend more time at home, others are being forced to give up on their careers to devote themselves to caregiving, leading the way in the phenomenon dubbed as the “Great Resignation”. Others yet are reconstructing their careers after layoffs and business closures brought on by the pandemic, while some are re-imagining their work by launching entrepreneurial ventures or going into different industries. Working mothers are also making their voices heard by shining the light on the challenges they’re facing, calling for increased legislative measures around paid leave for working parents, or the Marshall plan for Moms, consisting in a plan to compensate moms for their unpaid labor.
All in all, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, working moms are setting the bar higher for themselves, organizations, businesses and society at large. As we’re ready to usher in a new year, and so many are setting goals for the future, its only appropriate for working mothers to learn from the past few years, and look forward with a few goals of our own, including:
Define and speak up about what is important to working mothers
While the pandemic did create innumerable issues for society at large, what it also did, is uncover the deep inequalities and inconsistencies plaguing working mothers. As schools closed and childcare resources dwindled to almost nothing, working mothers found themselves stuck at home with multiple jobs, including working remotely, homeschooling the kids, caring for the household and somehow remaining sane and healthy. The silver lining here, above this enormous, unfair cloud, is this situation has prompted many, if not most working moms, to start redefining what matters to them and speaking up for themselves.
Going forward and into the new year, working mothers are committed to defining and speaking what is truly important to them, in terms of family, childcare, elder care, paid leave and work, to cite a few.
Integrate all areas of life
What the pandemic has made obvious is the need to integrate work and life for working mothers. As the future of work is moving towards a remote environment, it’s becoming increasingly important to work at integrating, rather than balancing, work and life for mothers.
In the era of remote work and homeschooling kids, drawing a line in the sand between work and life is virtually impossible. Instead, a more integrated and flexible approach might just be the way to go for modern working mothers.
Be more authentic at work
Working moms are an asset to society in general, and to organizations and businesses in general. From managing multiple responsibilities to negotiating skills, working mothers bring multiple skills that can tremendously improve organizations.
However, these skills are more impactful when working mothers bring their authentic selves to the workplace. Whereas being a working mom might have been considered a career risk in the past, it is now a sign of increased diversity and inclusion, as well as an advantage to the world of work. More importantly, it is a powerful way to open the door for other working mothers coming behind.
Teach kids about what it means to be a working mother
Much of the stigma around working mothers stems from sheer ignorance and lack of education. Much of this lack of awareness starts at home, from the way little boys and girls are socialized, to the implicit and explicit messages they get while growing up. To remedy this, it’s crucial to demystify the misconceptions around working mothers from the onset.
As working moms, we can change these false narratives starting from the way we raise our own kids. From having honest conversations with our children about work, to taking them to the office, we can teach them that not only is it ok to be a working mom, but that there should be more working mothers out there.
Make peace with the guilt
One of the things that is not often talked is the heightened level of guilt felt by working mothers during this pandemic. Spread thin between work, household chores, homeschooling and childcare, most working moms could hardly ever be present in one place or focused on one thing at a time. This in turn caused so many to drop out of the workforce, give in to depression and lower levels of mental health, and generally succumbing to the pressure and massive amounts of guilt.
This coming year, as working mothers, there is a need to make peace with the mom guilt once and for all. Although it may always be present, it can be reframed as motivation instead of an obstacle.
Contribute to gender equality
Working mothers need one another, not just as sources of support, but also as agents of the new Working Motherhood of the future. This also means contributing to gender equality in the workplace by serving as an ally to other working moms, advocating for equal pay, as well as providing women opportunities to advance in their careers. Outside of work, this can also mean participating in local and national politics to promote gender equality.
Advocating for Paid leave
Paid leave is crucial for working moms, and this despite the fact that the United States ranks last among the countries with family-friendly policies. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 requires companies with 50 or more employees to offer mothers of newborns or adopted children 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year. This is compared for instance, to countries like Bulgaria, which offers its new mothers 90% of their salary for more than a year.
Advocating for paid leave by exercising our political rights, speaking up at work or on the platform of our choice, should be one important goal of working moms in the next year.
Consider mental health
The impact of the pandemic has revealed deep, unfortunately often disastrous consequences, on women’s, and working mothers’ mental health. Hence the need to pay more attention to working mothers’ mental state, and general well-being.
Whether it’s engaging in or advocating for more therapy, or focusing more on one’s well-being, mental health should definitely be one of working mothers’ priorities in the new year.
Invest in financial education and empowerment
As working mothers are changing the way they relate to work and life in general, and more structural changes are needed to support them, many, if not most of these changes will require funding and monetary investments. This is where it becomes important for working mothers to harness and leverage the financial knowledge and acumen necessary to do so. Additionally, working mothers are often the ones to determine the education, including the financial education, of their children, and by extension families and communities.
Whether it’s taking an investment class, revisiting one’s budget, or coming up with a new approach to manage money, financial education constitutes an important priority for working mothers.
Building a legacy
Last but not least, working mothers stand on each other’s shoulders. The care, work and devotion of each working mother builds a legacy that the next working mother stands upon. Much of the advances for the benefit of working moms have been achieved by fellow working moms themselves. Hence the importance of creating a legacy as a working mother, through our children, our families, our person and the work we achieve on this plane of life.
Overall, 2022 marks a pivotal year for working mothers, coming out of a global pandemic and re-setting the rules of work and life for moms. Setting goals that can help further the welfare, well-being and fulfillment of working moms can go a long way towards creating a new, improved and powerful working motherhood.
Every year towards somewhere from the beginning to the end of December, the oh so familiar goal-setting, resolution-making dance starts again. From setting SMART goals to building vision boards, it’s all about setting intentions, objectives and/or resolutions for the New Year. Despite these dire statistics, many still believe in setting goals, including many working women. However, nearly 80% of all goals set for the New Year are dropped by the month of February. As studies have found women set goals differently than men, could there be a way to improve the goal-setting process and results by considering these gender differences?
According to one study analyzing gender differences in private and public goal-setting, that is when information about goals is public vs. being private, women tend to choose lower goals than men in general. While men generally tend to outperform women under both private and public goal-setting contexts, women perform worse than women when their goals are made public, as opposed to when their goals are private, in which case they perform better than men. These findings indicate lower levels of self-confidence in women in general, despite the fact that they set more ambitious public goals, which can be explained by the need to socially conform and fit in with the popular opinion. These also confirm higher levels of self-confidence in men, while also supporting gender differences in the attribution of success to external factors such as luck for instance by men, as opposed to internal factors such as skills and abilities for women. Furthermore, the fact that women perform worse under public-goal setting can be correlated with women’s lower performance in competitive environments.
As related to the nature of the goals set by men and women, a 2015 Harvard study demonstrates that while women have more life goals than men, a smaller number of these goals is associated with achieving power in their careers. This is corroborated by earlier studies according to which men and women regard their environments, more specifically their work environments, with different attitudes and expectations, taking us right back to the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which females’ position stands at the self-fulfillment level, while males’ position is at the survival level.
What does this mean for women and goal-setting? One thing it could mean is that the traditional ways in which we’ve learnt to set big, ambitious goals was never adapted to the way women set goals. What it could also mean is that if we adapted the goal-setting process to women more, we may obtain more effective and impactful goals overall. If you’re a working woman reading this, then you may want to re-evaluate the way you have been setting goals. Here are three tips to get started:
Start with private rather than public intentions
Goal-setting is a powerful process that requires some serious introspection and self-awareness. As a working woman and mom, it is important for me to set goals that are authentically aligned with my purpose, as opposed to goals imposed by a need to conform to societal or other forms of pressures. Starting this process in a private manner before making any public commitments is a good way to ensure your goals, and commitment to achieve them, are solid.
Tie your professional goals with your life goals
There’s a reason why studies are showing that women have more life goals than men. Considering that women are more concerned with self-fulfillment than men, as well as the many personal and community hats they wear, tying professional to life goals can help check both the life and work boxes.
Avoid competitive goals
As research has shown women perform less well when setting public goals, due to the competitive nature of the latter, it could help to set goals more focused on personal improvement than competitive in nature.
All in all, the goal-setting process for women can be adapted to the unique ways women think, as well as how they envision their lives and careers. This can not only help set more authentic, sustainable and purposeful goals, but also improve women’s overall performance. It is also a wake-up call for organizations and businesses to revisit the goal-setting process based on gender differences, fore more impactful, high-performing goals and more engaged, committed employees.
Holiday stress is real. For working moms, it’s all too real. So much so that it can rightfully be considered the other silent pandemic for working moms. One that takes a heavy psychological, mental and certainly physical toll on working mothers tasked with the oh so unrealistic and overly taxing job of creating the overrated, overly expensive and unnecessary magic of the modern, over-the-top family holidays…
I remember times when the true magic of the holidays was about spending time together, sharing homemade gifts and laughter around a good, simple meal. Times when receiving ONE gift, just one, in my home country of Senegal, was enough. When a small, poorly lit, scarcely decorated tree was a luxury…There was magic then, real, unadulterated, magic, even in 80-degree weather in a country where Christians were, and still are, the minority…Even then, working moms were also largely in charge of orchestrating the holiday magic, yet it was an organic magic that was already there…
Fast-forward a few decades, and the organic holiday magic has been replaced with the commercial archetype of consumerism, complete with perfect hosting tableware, exquisitely wrapped premium “toys of the year”, and over-the-top everything…All of it to be organized, managed, budgeted and delivered by the industrious, best-dressed, physically fit, and pleasant all-around-wonderful working mothers of the year, at the risk of raising self-entitled children and perpetuating an already existing unfair division of labor in the household…With a smile too, please and thank you…
Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. In an interview with CNN, Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson, respective Director and Co-Director of Better Life Lab, a New America think tank’s program with the purpose of advancing gender equity and elevating the value of care, suggested that easing working mothers’ holiday load should be a family affair. According to them, discussing the holidays as a family is a crucial initial step. This allows everyone, Mom included, to share what they truly value about the holidays. This way, everyone is clear on what is important, and there’s room for the mother to also express what she values, so as to get what she also needs out of this precious time of year. The same rationale can also be applied to gift-giving, as a meaningful (and not just commercial) process involving the whole family, and not just one falling on Mom’s shoulders. Likewise, the responsibility of organizing these discussions should also be spread among all family members, so as not to be Mom’s burden.
These insights from the Better Lab are extremely valuable, in that it is high time (and has been for quite some time) to consider this silent pandemic plaguing working moms at a time of year when the proverbial cheer is often replaced with exhaustion, worry and even depression for many. How can you, as a working mom, practically implement the necessary changes in your own household so you can finally enjoy the holidays instead of working through them? Here are a few tips to get started:
Assess what you would want out of the holidays
What would the ideal holidays look like for you? What do you truly want out of this time of year? What traditions are important to you, and what others are not so important?
These are examples of questions to ask yourself and honestly answer as a working woman and mom. This is also an introspective process that will require you to shed society’s pre-conceived notions of working mothers’ role, especially during the holidays, and instead embrace the truth of who you are and what you truly want.
Have an honest conversation with your family and friends
Establishing what you want out of the holidays is only the first step. The second, and often most challenging step, is to communicate it to your loved ones. This can be especially hard an overwhelming sense of “mommy guilt” may seep in and take over. You may also face the shock and even resentment of your family and friends, who may not initially understand your transformation and/or frankly desire to go along.
However, despite these obstacles, having an honest, transparent and forthcoming conversation can go a long way towards beginning (and continuing) to lay the foundation for a different type of dynamic during the holidays. An important part of the conversation will be to consider everyone’s values as related to the holidays, yours included, and reach a compromise around sharing tasks and responsibilities that honors these.
Relinquish control
Last but not least, it’s going to be so important to learn to let go! As a working mom, as much as may want to have different, more balanced holiday traditions, you may face your own need for control stubbornly standing in the way of change. It’s ok to relinquish control, let others take over, and take a backseat, at the risk of things not being as “perfect” and flawless as you would like them to be.
Are you a working mom who’s ready to end this silent pandemic of holiday stress? Email us at corporate@thecorporatesister.com and tell us your stories of change.
Performance reviews are stressful. No matter how well you did, or how positive your experience may have been, the fact is, being evaluated on your performance can trigger a certain amount of stress. Especially if you’re a working woman, as gender bias, in addition to the stress already induced, also plays a prominent role in the outcomes obtained…
Research has confirmed performance appraisals are indeed stressful, both on the side of the appraiser and the appraisee. While a higher degree of physiological response was found on the part of males in the study, females appear to pay more of a psychological price. In the context of annual performance reviews more specifically, the psychological price paid by female employees is compounded by the existence of a gender bias against women. Content analysis of annual performance reviews demonstrates female employees are 1.4 more times likely to get “critical subjective feedback”, as reported by the Harvard Business Review. Women also tend to receive less constructive feedback, which would target both positive aspects of their performance while also pinpointing areas of potential growth. Instead, they tend to get feedback that is more vague and elusive in nature. Another finding attributes women’s performance to luck or length of time in the office, as opposed to skills, talents and abilities. With all these negative factors embedded in the performance review process, is it then any wonder that the proverbial “glass ceiling” and “concrete wall” still threaten women’s career progress?
As a working woman, you may have already realized the existence of this bias as part of your annual performance review. You may even have pointed it out to fellow colleagues, friends and family, yet may not have had the opportunity to bring it up to your management. Or you may have boldly voiced your concerns about it, without getting a clear or substantive answer to your worries. Despite this, there are ways to go about fighting the pervasive and unfortunately persisting gender bias in performance reviews. Here are three (3) tips that may help:
Suggest more objective performance criteria
Considering the language used in performance reviews is often vague and gender-neutral, suggesting more objective criteria for your performance review can remove some of the bias involved. For example, referring to more specific attributes related to the projects you’ve completed, such as timeliness, results obtained, etc, can provide more objective and constructive information to assess your performance.
Ask for a broader set of reviewers
Being reviewed by one individual with a given work style, personality, and priorities can be limiting , especially if said individual is prone to gender bias. Having a broader set of reviewers can not only expand the range of feedback received, but also contribute to getting more accurate and constructive reviews. The more diverse the group of reviewers, the better, more varied and enriching the feedback.
Request more frequent performance reviews
Annual performance reviews usually occur during one of the busiest times of the year, when most managers are desperately attempting to successfully close the year, and most people are exhausted by the pressure of year-end deadlines and holidays looming near. Requesting more frequent performance reviews spread out throughout the year can help alleviate the weight of an often incomplete and biased year-end review. Additionally, more timely feedback on projects and assignments throughout the year can help adjust one’s performance in a faster and more efficient manner over time.
Yes, overall, performance reviews are riddled with bias, gender bias more specifically. For many, if not most working women, it can be quite disheartening. However, and as more and more companies are re-assessing their performance review systems, working women can also proactively and constructively fight back by demanding more constructive, frequent and diverse performance reviews.
Have you experienced gender bias in your performance reviews?
