Canada’s Growth Strategy Must Support Women-Led Businesses

There’s no question that Canada is focused intensively on strengthening its economy. Everyone in every region, in business, in politics, in the workplace and at home is talking about how we can best compete and thrive in a rapidly shifting world.

But if we want to build a resilient economy that is truly competitive, we need to look more closely at one powerful and still under-supported driver of growth: the power of women.

Why Women-Led Businesses Matter to Canada’s Economy

Women are much more than a niche in the economy. Women are now majority owners of nearly 20% of private sector businesses in Canada, according to research from the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH). Across Canada’s business sectors, female-led firms are contributing meaningfully to innovation and exports, and they’re creating jobs. 

This isn’t easy. Women are participating more and more in the upper reaches of our economy, but it’s still more male-dominated than many people realize. The big positive change is that more women are leading, navigating complex systems, and staying in the room long enough to scale the businesses they’ve started and helped build. 

The Challenges Women Entrepreneurs Still Face

As a woman entrepreneur leading a proud Canadian women-led public relations agency, I’ve experienced firsthand both the opportunity and the friction.

When I started my firm, I wasn’t thinking about anything as lofty or abstract as economic policy. I was thinking about building something meaningful—creating space for talented, ambitious women to learn, lead, and find their voices. 

I was thinking about the mentors who helped me early in my career, the ones who shared perspective, opened doors and helped me build my confidence.

Confidence is rarely discussed in economic policy. But it matters.

The reality is that many women build businesses while also navigating unspoken expectations about leadership style, motherhood, or their very presence in a boardroom. There’s constant pressure on them to figure out how assertive is “too assertive.”

Many of us have sat in rooms where we were the only women at the table. Many of us have seen our ideas get validated only after being repeated by someone else. 

These are not complaints. These are experiences. 

The Invisible Load of Building

It’s important to recognize the work women do even before they show up at their paid jobs. Even before the pandemic, which has amplified many trends, data from Statistics Canada showed that women in Canada spent an average of nearly four hours per day on unpaid domestic and caregiving work, compared to 2.4 hours for men. In 2022, nearly one in three women were providing unpaid care to children, and almost one in four were caring for an adult family member.

That time does not disappear when a woman starts a business. 

Motherhood, in particular, changes the calculus. The systems in the workplace were not always designed with dual responsibilities in mind.

If we want more women-led businesses to grow beyond survival mode and into scale mode, we have to acknowledge the social dynamics that influence economic outcomes.

Mentorship Is More Than Career Advice

Throughout my career, mentorship made a difference.

Sometimes it was formal. Often, it wasn’t. It was a conversation after a difficult client meeting.
It was someone saying, “You’re ready,” before I fully believed it myself.

When I built my firm, I wanted to establish an environment where women could experiment, learn from mistakes, speak up and build confidence.

Because confidence is key to making decisions effectively, for everything from pricing to negotiation, hiring and expansion. It affects whether one takes a calculated risk or stays smaller than they could be.

Senior leaders need to do more than offer advice; they need to actively champion women, encouraging them to step forward into meaningful opportunities and supporting them in the rooms where decisions are made. The goal isn’t to just have women in the room but to ensure they are truly part of the conversation, the influence and the outcomes.

What Needs to Change and Who Can Drive It

If we want women-led businesses to truly thrive, change must happen across multiple layers of society.

Government can:

• Continue investing in childcare and care infrastructure as economic policy; this will result in more women participating fully in the workforce and as entrepreneurs. 
  
• Expand mentorship, funding, and leadership development programs that support women founders as they move from the startup stage to scale.
  
• Encourage flexible work frameworks and modern workplace policies that reflect the realities of caregiving and entrepreneurship today.
  
  

Corporate Canada can:

• Ensure women are not just present in leadership pipelines but sponsored into decision-making roles.
  
• Diversify supplier relationships to include more women-led firms.
  
• Challenge outdated leadership stereotypes that still influence who is perceived as “ready.”
  
  

Communities and families can:

• Normalize shared caregiving.
  
• Encourage ambition in girls and women without attaching guilt to it.
  
• Recognize entrepreneurship as a legitimate, demanding career path. 
  
  

And women leaders—myself included—must continue to open doors wider than they were opened for us.

If we’re serious about building a competitive economy for the future, women have to be at the heart of the plan.