The Female Entrepreneur

From gender bias to pay disparity, women in the business world face growing challenges compared to their male counterparts.

“Growing up, for girls, all you hear is you can’t, you can’t, you can’t,” says Jody Bouffard, co-owner of Blush & Blu, the bar and coffeehouse on Colfax. “But every time somebody has told me I can’t,” adds Jody, “I say, watch me, because I can.”

And succeed she has, as Jody was just awarded Entrepreneurial Woman of the Year for 2015 by the Denver Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

Her path to business ownership began when she was 19 years old. Jody moved from Vermont to Colorado and worked as a barback at The Elle, a lesbian bar on Colfax and Speer next to the Denver Diner.

“Every weekend I would say to my bosses, ‘Someday I’m going to own this bar.’ I loved being there. I loved the energy of it. I loved the environment of it, even though sometimes I was scrubbing the toilets or mopping the dance floor.”

Jody worked a second job at Walgreens and saved her money. Though The Elle eventually closed, Jody realized her dream of running her own business in 2000 when she helped open her first bar, The Wave. She accomplished this without the help of a business degree or any formal training, diligently attending “the school of hard knocks” every semester.

Since then, Jody has opened three additional bars, including tHERe Coffee Bar and Lounge in 2005, HER Bar in 2008 (which is now X-Bar), and finally Blush & Blu, which occupies the same space tHERe did.

But despite her success and 15 years of experience as a business owner, Jody still struggles against gender bias. “When I deal with my liquor reps, or I deal with new vendors, 95 percent of the time they are male reps. And in comparison to X-Bar, what they get from my same reps versus what I get are night and day.”

Jody emphasizes that she ordered the same amount of product as X-Bar does now, yet she was unable to garner the same amount of support and funding from certain liquor representatives.

And Jody is not alone in this. Earlier this year, Harvard Business School released a study that showed venture capitalists prefer to invest in male-owned businesses versus female-owned businesses.

When men and women both pitched business ideas for actual companies to investors, 68 percent of the time the investors preferred to finance male-owned businesses. Only 32 percent of the time did investors prefer to finance women-owned businesses.

“We still live in a very, very segregated world in terms of gender,” says Holly Hatch, Jody’s wife and co-owner of Blush & Blu. They are the only female bar owners in the Denver LGBT community. “Women still don’t have the same kind of opportunities in the business sphere that men do.”

Holly echoes Jody’s experiences of bias when dealing with outside vendors, adding that they constantly have to reassert themselves when working with liquor reps, especially when it comes to fundraisers. They equate it to “pulling teeth.”

“You feel it all the time,” says Holly. “You feel like you’re always going to be second guessed. And I don’t know if that’s a part of our culture and the conditioning that we have as kids, that it’s always going to be more of a struggle to prove yourself as a woman. I don’t know if that’s something we’ve learned along the way.”

And that struggle is echoed in the workplace. The Denver Post reported earlier this year that there is gender disparity regarding pay in Colorado, with women earning 78 cents for every dollar men make.

Many advocates have called for legislation to help curb gender bias in the business world, but entrepreneurs like Jody are frustrated at the lack of progress in cultivating substantial, long-lasting change by a government that seems forever in gridlock.

“Go back 100 years … you had women like Alice Paul, Susan B. Anthony, and the Suffrage Movement —  girls picketing in front of the White House to make a statement for equal rights. That was in 1912. It is 2014 and women still do not have equal rights.”

Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, sponsored the Paycheck Fairness Act earlier this year to combat wage disparity in which women earn 77 cents for every dollar men make. Unfortunately, the Senate blocked the legislation on April 9, with some Senate Republicans arguing that the legislation would do little to help women in the workplace. And though President Obama signed an executive order earlier this year prohibiting federal contractors from punishing employees who discuss their salary, making it easier for women to know if they are being paid less than men, Jody says it’s not enough.

“I voted for Obama in 2008 because he stood there at the Democratic National Convention and said, ‘I want my daughters to have the same rights as your sons.’ Where is that? Where’s my dollar-for-dollar for the man doing the same job I’m doing?”

Both Holly and Jody emphasize that true change can only occur through education, which would work to shift the cultural perception regarding women in the male-dominated business world.

“It should start in elementary school where boys and girls are taught they are equal, because by the time you hit high school, girls are put into home economics classes,” says Jody. “They should have entrepreneur classes for girls in high school.”

Holly adds that it’s also imperative to eradicate socially-constructed gender norms often ingrained in children at an early age. “Regardless of what happens with legislation and making wages equal, if the people who are in those situations don’t see themselves as equal, it’s not going to change.”

On August 26, the nation celebrated Women’s Equality Day, which marked the passage of the 19^th Amendment granting women the right to vote in 1920. Susan B. Anthony, one of the architects of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, said that she prayed “every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men.”

The work of Holly, Jody, and other female entrepreneurs echoes those words, spoken almost a century ago. “Women are saying we are capable — just like men — to do these things,” says Holly.