A recently published book authored by two professors at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., looks at how gender and minority status shapes entrepreneurial decision-making. The topic is long over-due, they say, since minority women in the US start new businesses at four times the rate of non-minority men and women.

According to Minority Women Entrepreneurs: How Outsider Status Can Lead to Better Business Practices, minority women entrepreneurs are thriving as business owners, but their stories are seldom told. Few think of minority women as successful entrepreneurs.

Through in-depth interviews and first-hand accounts from minority women entrepreneurs, the authors found that, in innovative and exciting ways, minority women use their outsider status to develop socially conscious business practices that support the communities with which they identify.

These entrepreneurs reject the idea that business values are separate from personal values and instead balance profits with social good and environmental sustainability. This pattern is repeated in statistical evidence from around the globe that women contribute a much higher percentage of their earnings to social good than do men, but until now there was no clear explanation of why.

Using sociological and psychological theories, the authors explain why women, especially minority women, have a tendency to create socially responsible businesses.

Author, Mary Godwyn is assistant professor of Sociology. She teaches introductory and advanced courses in Sociology, Women's Studies, and Gender Studies and focuses on social theory as it applies to issues of inequality.  Her co-author, Donna Stoddard, is associate professor of Information Technology Management. She teaches undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses related to management information systems and business strategy, and explores how small and large companies leverage enterprise systems to improve communication and collaboration.

The innovations provided by the women in this study suggest fresh solutions to economic inequality and humanistic alternatives to exploitative business policies. This is a radically new, socially integrated model that can be used by businesses everywhere.

Carol Stack, author of Call to Home and All Our Kin, describes the book as, "An evocative and enlightening success story that turns conventional wisdom on the business practices of minority women upside down.  Godwyn and Stoddard provide intimate knowledge of minority women entrepreneurs who are deeply committed to their communities and to making prudent entrepreneurial decisions."

The book is published by Greenleaf Publishing, 2011 http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/productdetail.kmod?productid=3303.