Courtright finished a cookbook she had been working on just in time for the holiday. And in the early spring she plans to open a new business, Walrus, a community marketplace that buys and sells affordable framed artwork. It will be located in a historic building in the Camden neighborhood of North Minneapolis. She says she’s filling a niche in a community with no shortage of local artists. “I am opening up on very limited funds, but it’s kind of fun,” she says.

Data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shows that female-owned small businesses took the brunt of the economic downturn, and they are more likely than male-owned small businesses to have reported a significant business decline since the pandemic started. Before the pandemic began, 67% of male-owned businesses ranked the overall health of their business as “somewhat or very good,” while only 60% of female-owned businesses did. By July, however, the number of female-owned businesses in good health had fallen 13 percentage points to 47%, while the number of male business owners reporting “somewhat or very good” health fell only 5 points to 62%.

And while economic conditions remain dicey for small business owners, entrepreneurs like Courtright are pivoting and keeping hope alive. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, applications for new businesses in the third quarter were 1.5 million, an 82% jump from the previous year (though the fourth quarter saw a 28.5% dip to 1.115 million).

Listening And Empathy
The devastating toll the pandemic has taken on women has kept financial advisors busy calming their clients’ fears about their finances. According to Schneewind, “It takes a lot of listening, a lot of empathy and then trying to comfort them with money they have saved to show them how we might have to pivot ever so slightly in their plan.” She has a roster of mostly wealthy clients and says in the past six months she has been fielding an unusual number of calls from her female clients.

“They are saying, ‘Hey, can you look at my financial plans really, really closely again, because I just want to know that I am going to be OK because I don’t know how much longer I can sustain this level of stress,’” Schneewind says. Like everyone else, her clients are having to juggle jobs and home life with children in virtual classrooms. “It just puts a lot of stress on you, and women tend to carry that stress.”

Advisor Michelle Connell agrees. “The biggest issue is that women are the caregivers of their families, and so whether you are somebody who is a working mother or taking care of older parents, you are affected when you are trying to do business from home,” says Connell, founder and owner of Portia Capital Management, a wealth management firm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “You are juggling your kids being on Zoom and trying to go along with their lesson plan and trying to keep track of what’s going on at work. It’s very difficult,” she says.

Connell, who serves on a local early childhood education advisory board, has seen firsthand the struggles many mothers endured when day care facilities closed. She says many women who depended on those facilities for childcare lack other options. Some relied on relatives, but many lost their jobs or scaled back because they worked in industries that have less flexibility and are the first to be hit economically in a situation like the pandemic.

“They are not working, they are not contributing as much to their 401(k) or savings, and because of how their professional situation has changed, they are going to have to work longer,” Connell says, adding that women in general were going to have to work longer anyway because they live longer.

A Burden On Retirement
Several recent studies have shown that women are concerned about the pandemic’s impact on their portfolio and their retirement. A study by Greenwood Village, Colo., retirement services provider Empower Retirement and its subsidiary Personal Capital found that 31% of women “barely have their head above water” while only 19% of men say the same, and only 54% of women are confident they can retire when they want while 67% of men are.

A survey from fintech company SimplyWise further found a record 32% of people in their 50s are now planning to postpone retirement from work, and the same goes for 21% of people in their 60s.