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Women today are generally accustomed to competing with men, because a data shows that men are heavily favored.

However, in 1994, Congress declared that at least 5 percent of U.S. procurement dollars should go toward women-owned small business to show the fairness, along with the growth and development of women-owned business. Thus, the SBA loans for women was started.

Small Business Administration, implement and set-aside program for women.

After six years, Congress ordered SBA to study and set-aside program for women. Another six years with a delay at SBA unit, the result was passed to agency which launched a study with the Rand Corp to identify industry sectors where qualified female bidders win a low proportion of contract awards.
Rand found women to be awarded a disproportionately small number of contracts in 87% of 2,300 business categories. Rand looked at the dollar value of contracts and found women underrepresented, because a few female-owned firms won big contracts. However, a data presented shows that only 1,247 of America’s 10.4 million female-owned businesses could benefit. This certainly is a small number that could benefit this program.

With another data presentation in 2006, women-owned businesses received $11.6 billion in federal contracts, just an increase of $1.4 billion over the previous year, this represented the only 3.4% of all federal prime contracts.
The SBA was sued in 2004 by the U.S Women’s Chamber of Commerce over the program’s delay. Then the federal judge ordered the SBA to submit a timeline for implementing it and ruled that agency had ‘sabotaged’ the program.

This failure to implement the Women’s Procurement Program has cost women business owners at least $6 billion in lost contracts, said in a statement by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chair of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee.

And conclude that women- owned small business should keep them apprised of the situation for further developments.