ASBL 39 Lloyd Chapman, Our Don’t Cheat Women Project

ASBL 39 Lloyd Chapman, Our Don’t Cheat Women

Lloyd Chapman, American Small Business League founder and president, discusses our www.dontcheatwomen.com project.

“Candidates should run to end discrimination against women in federal contracting. They’d be crazy not to.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses. Small businesses create the vast majority of all net new jobs. They employ half the workforce. America is a small business economy.

They are supposed to get at least 23% of all federal contract dollars, with 5% going to women-owned small businesses.

Here’s the problem:

Women are half the population. They own 40% of all businesses. They sell what the government buys. How is 5% even remotely fair? It’s not. And they almost never get that much. The government admits that women got 5% twice in the last 30 years, in 2015 and 2019.

Half the taxpayers (women) are getting less than 5% of federal contracts, while men are getting 95%. Lloyd thinks that is illegal; that a lawsuit for discrimination would win under the Civil Rights Act. (Should women pay 5% of taxes and men pay 95%?)

The federal government is the world’s biggest purchaser of goods and services, projected to spend $800 billion in 2025. Lloyd says it’s actually twice that. But the point is, it buys everything, including what is made by women-owned small businesses.

Women own over 14 million businesses. They generate $2.7 trillion in annual revenue. They employ 12 million people. They are a force to be reckoned it.

And elections are won by small margins, often. Candidates who champion our goal of raising from 5% to 15% the contract dollars that must go to women-owned small businesses (WOSBs) will win, we believe. That would raise to 23% the contracts going to small businesses in general and create an economic boom.

The Chair of the Senate small business committee in 2010 said that for every 1% increase in contracts to small businesses, 100,000 jobs get created. If WOSBs got 15% and all small businesses 33%, that would be 3.3 million new jobs created on top of the 2 million jobs that America typically creates every year, a gigantic economic surge for the middle class.

“Why would you not want to do that?”

Plus, it would help women become political equals. Men dominate because they earn and save more than women.

Men donate more to campaigns and therefore have more influence with politicians. Men run and win more offices than women. Men hold roughly 75% of all seats in the House, the Senate, all state legislatures, all presidents’ cabinets… almost that many governor chairs … and 90% of committee chair and party leadership positions.

When women participate as equals in the councils of government, Lloyd says we might have fewer wars.

Lloyd said the government cheats small businesses in two ways.

First, Fortune 500 firms get hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts that are called small business contracts (blamed on miscodings or computer glitches). Second, the government excludes at least half of all federal acquisitions from the requirement that 23% of those should go to small businesses.

See all this and more at www.dontcheatwomen.com.

The American Small Business League (www.ASBL.com) is working to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to big businesses. Our www.DontCheatWomen.com project seeks economic and political fairness for women.

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