May 10, 2022

People of color with nerve and determination and a desire to create jobs in minority neighborhoods, with a great business idea – but very limited family wealth – more often end up as bankruptcy statistics than as the next Bob Johnson or Jeff Bezos.

“Entrepreneurial Inequity in America: The unrecognized challenge to closing the racial wealth gap” is the latest effort to track some of the reasons why that continues to happen.

In a presentation published today and authored by Gabe Horwitz, Curran McSwigan and Don Cavins Jr., the authors term entrepreneurial inequity “the most unrecognized contributor to the racial wealth gap in the United States….”

“We examine barriers throughout the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem holding back women and people of color from starting, scaling, and owning businesses. We also lay out how entrepreneurship is essential for wealth building, and how achieving equity in entrepreneurship could unleash a new era of business growth, hiring, and wealth.”

The authors do not offer any solutions, but perhaps Forum readers will offer some at future Forums.

Alliance for Entrepreneurial Equity, the publisher of the study, is a collaboration between the National Urban League and Third Way, a Washington-based center-left think tank. According to Third Way, the goal is to maneuver into place “a long-term federal agenda that dramatically increases opportunities for minority and female entrepreneurs to start and expand successful businesses.”

The slides from the presentation are below and can be downloaded as a single PDF here.