New Capital, New Language

This ruthless bloating of the biggest is misnamed “economic efficiency,” an apt phrase only if your intentional goal is to melt permafrost and glaciers, planning Vermont’s future as beachfront property. Fortunately, some Vermont capital is held by local hands, often the hands of women. Their money numbers are tiny, relatively speaking, in a world of billions and trillions, but Vermont is a small state that considers itself a leader.

Keep in mind that we women are new players on the economic scene. Before the mid-19th century, married women couldn’t inherit property, being property themselves. Some states gave married women some rights, but it was New York’s comprehensive 1848 Married Women’s Property Act—thanks in part to the efforts of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton—that won married women full rights to own property. It became a national template.

In 1860, again thanks to Stanton’s efforts, New York broadened women’s ability to engage in business and manage their income. Until then, working women couldn’t keep their own paycheck. If you think a factory handing a working woman’s paycheck to her dad or husband was nuts, remember that before 1974—just 45 years ago—women couldn’t open a bank account or get a loan without a male cosigner. Thirty-one years ago, women still needed a male cosigner to get business loans, until the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988 changed that.

Today, the economic potential of women could make all the difference to Vermont’s prosperity, says Change the Story. This statewide initiative—an alliance of the Vermont Women’s Fund, the Vermont Commission on Women, and Vermont Works for Women—generates inspiring economic data. Change the Story reports that between 2007 and 2012 women started businesses at twice the rate of men’s startups, though women still lag behind male entrepreneurship overall. If women chose business ownership at the same rate as men, we’d have 10,500 new businesses. Dollar-wise, women-owned businesses are small, often providing self-employment. Even if just one in four of the existing 23,417 women-owned businesses in Vermont hired one additional worker, we’d create over 5,000 new jobs. So, what are we waiting for?

Business expansion often requires financing. Small business finance has been tighter since 2008’s crash, and it has always been tightest for people of color and women. But recent studies reveal women-managed businesses make more money. So venture capital is newly seeking women out. This September 25–26, for instance, Vermont Innovations Commons (VIC) is hosting the third annual Vermont Investors Summit at Burlington’s Courtyard Marriott, featuring keynote speaker Deborah Jackson.

Jackson and her cofounder, Andrea Turner Moffit, used their experience as investment bankers at Goldman Sachs and Citibank to create in 2015 what they call an “investors’ ecosystem.” Their company, Plum Alley, funds women innovators and people “at the margins,” while also enabling women to invest in “forward-looking companies.” So far, they’ve backed startups in biotechnology, cancer immunotherapy, online marketplaces, and software.  

Their host, VIC, calls itself a “launching pad for entrepreneurs and innovators, a nurturing partner for startup and growth firms.” Their goal is to create living-wage jobs and keep Vermont’s young innovators in the state. Biofriendly terms are found on their website too, referring to Vermont’s “entrepreneurial DNA,” presumably of interest to “investor ecosystems.” Neither of these exists in biology, but we can hope this isn’t mere green-washing but a wiser way of thinking about the eco-logy in eco-nomy. 

Samantha Roach-Gerber is innovations director at VCET (Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies). VCET says it offers “unfair advantages to Vermont’s entrepreneurs,” namely connections to a network of peers, coaches, and capital. The Vermont Seed Capital Fund, $5.1 million in revolving venture money, returns profits to grow the fund, an “evergreen” joint venture of the state and of US Senator Patrick Leahy. Roach-Gerber concedes the fund is “tiny,” yet has funded 24 startups at $25,000–$250,000 and leveraged more. “We’re always looking out for our companies’ best interests, aggregating capital … from angel investors and other capital funds.” VCET’s interest is in “high opportunity businesses,” which trend to the technological.

In 2020, for the third year in a row, the VCET and Hotel Vermont in Burlington will host Female Founders Speaker Series. The panel discussions among business owners always sell out, Roach-Gerber says, and despite 90 women attending, the events have been surprisingly intimate.  “An honesty comes out and sparks relationship and sharing … it’s really pretty magical,” she says.  

More grounded Vermont investments are in the hands of Janice St. Onge in Montpelier, through the Flexible Capital Fund. A certified Community Development Financial Institution, it provides risk capital for Vermont’s food system, forestry products, and renewable energy. So far they’ve invested $4.4 million in 15 Vermont companies. What makes them different?  St. Onge says she’s proudest of Flex Fund’s “royalty financing,” which is based on a piece of the revenue stream rather than a share of ownership. “We remain flexible with the cash flow needs of a business and … in a way that treats our borrowers as partners.”

Seeking “regenerative, not extractive businesses,” the fund values social and environmental responsibility, livable wages, and diversity in ownership, governance, and management. St. Onge adds, “The fund’s own governance is diverse—four of our board of managers and two of our three-member investment committee are women.” They recently added to their portfolio MammaSez, a woman-owned plant-based meal delivery company, investing $150,000.

St. Onge is also part of a new initative, the Vermont Women’s Investors Network (WIN).  VT WIN aims to close the gender gap in funding for local businesses with positive environmental and social impact.  On October 1, in Stowe, Vermont, they and the Northern New England Womens’s Investors Network will host Integrated Capital, an event featuring Joel Solomon, author of The Clean Money Revolution, and Deb Nelson of RSF Social Finance, a cohort that dares call themselves “financial activists.” They even speak of poverty, rumored to be of some relevance to women.

Beyond Innovation, the Basics

Of course, the simplest way to widen Vermont women’s prosperity would be to pay women fairly. One hundred and forty businesses have already signed on to the Vermont Equal Pay Compact, pledging to improve pay equity, becoming Champions of Change. They understand that earning 84 cents on men’s dollar adds up to a deficit. Over a working lifetime, a high school graduate’s pay gap shortchanges her $700,000; with a graduate degree, she’s minus $2 million. Caring for her own family pays even worse: zero. Its onus also results in women’s higher rates of part-time employment. 

Whatever a woman’s innovative genius, business, or college degree, she still comes home to the work that remains her social measure. If we knock on her door to find her house and her hair a filthy mess and her children without cookies, the last thing we’re likely to say is, “Dear God, that poor girl’s husband is a slacker!” The US still misnames home labor “the informal economy,” implying nothing serious, when all the GDP rests upon it.

There are ways to count the real work of biology in nature and at home. Many nations now measure household, social, and environmental resources to make wiser policy decisions. Vermont is a leader in that, too, using progressive GPI measures (Genuine Progress Indicators). In 2018, Eric Zencey of the Gund Institute measured gains and losses in natural resources and also in domestic production; the latter accounted for 28.12 percent of the total GPI report, adding $5.56 billion to Vermont’s bottom line. Zencey also counted income inequality “the largest single drag” on the state’s general welfare.

Adding concrete measures like these to national GDP accounts is an issue for us all, men and women. Another is the four-day workweek, which I recommend in my book Screwnomics: How the Economy Works Against Women and Real Ways to Make Lasting Change. We all need equal pay, our bread, but we also need roses—time to enjoy family and community. Otherwise, what’s it all about? A four-day workweek standard is long overdue. And don’t worry: pay would not be cut, and the return in time would address long stagnant wages.

In July, the Washington Post ran an article titled “Thank God, It’s Thursday: The Four-Day Workweek Some Want to Bring to the U.S.” It compared interest in the US, still in its infancy, with Europe’s greater readiness for cutting work hours. According to the article, some US businesses with a four-day week report struggling to keep up, while others report fewer sick days and increased productivity.

Another proposition, a national dividend, sometimes called a universal basic income, could be thought of as fair return on our long-term time investments in one another, caring for friends, family, and community.

Will Vermont’s venture and seed capitalists include innovations like these in their activism? I hope so. Yet in the United States, a money monopoly still misnames any collective actions of, for, and by the people as socialism and counts home life more sacred when unsullied by money. These screwy ideas explain why American women have yet to win what most global women already have: a livable minimum wage and family leave time (both sunk by our Dem-led Vermont legislature this year), dependable and affordable childcare, as well as sick time, health insurance, flex time, and vacations.

A growing number of Oprahs on the Forbes billionaire list signals a spurious “progress.” We need a much larger change in economic purpose to claim an economy of our own. Consider another woman icon who heads a corporation that bags $65 million American tax dollars every single effing day. CEO Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin makes innovative, hugely violent weapons, including the F35s. Despite city council votes and citizen protests about their noise affecting young brains and old ears, their pollution of air and water, and their nuclear capability, 20 F35s, at $94 million each, will arrive in Burlington next month

Hewson is considered a marker of how open and gender free our innovative and technological free markets have become in a free democracy. But how free is it when our war spending obligations from 9/11 to today have racked up $5.9 trillion in bills, while slaying an estimated 724,000 warriors and civilians and displacing 21 million war refugees? (see Brown University’s Costs of War project). We apparently are free to pray over at least one mass shooting every day, thanks to a Congress bought by corporate powers still bent on making a global killing.

Hewson is called powerful because she makes $11 million a year. That’s less than Thomas Kennedy, CEO of the smaller Raytheon, at $17.9 million a year. But the $26.5 million for the CEO of both companies’ banker, the Bank of America, reveals the true order of our moneyed kingdoms. Women’s entering the world of money carries no guarantee of change or peace if we only aspire to replacing money monarchs with queens, still gaming a global war.

We live in times of gender questioning and the hope of putting “women’s issues” behind us. But there is such a thing as biologyand a future that requires both sexes pay closer attention. An economy of our own would pay those who bear arms, both real and figurative, far less than those who bear and care for and educate our children of every color and faith, exchanging our debts and our fears of yet another punishing downturn for a generous green future. 

Author and Vermont Woman founding editor Rickey Gard Diamond writes a column for Ms. magazine, “Women Unscrewing Screwnomics,” and will soon launch an educational nonprofit, An Economy of Our Own, an alliance of economic activists with women’s bold ideas for change. You can contact her at www.screwnomics.org.