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The failure rate among women business owners applying to be 8(a) certified is a national disgrace, exceeding 90%.
Although the reasons for denial vary widely from applicant to applicant, the one reason that appears in virtually every letter from the SBA reads, "It has been determined that you, the individual upon whom eligibility is based are not socially disadvantaged due to your gender".
There are only a few reasons that could exist for this huge percentage of women being denied. They include:
- The SBA requires a much higher standard of proof for women-owned businesses than they do for businesses owned by "classical minority groups", sometimes referred to as "designated groups". Whereas non-minority women have to prepare the "notorious social disadvantage narrative", while others do not, the evidentiary standard has been reduced from a level of "beyond a reasonable doubt" to a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, which only requires a convincing story that is more believable than not.
- Women business owners no longer experience gender prejudice or bias in their education, in the workplace or in running their businesses. If this was the case, then the hundreds of articles, class action lawsuits and affirmative action cases that show that women have in the past and continue to be discriminated against would all have to be a "massive feminine conspiracy".
- Women business owners who do apply grossly misunderstand what the SBA has to see in their narratives. The SBA staff that review these documents see the stories presented by most women applicants as just "sour grapes" tales of how unfair business life can be versus credible examples of gender bias.
Whereas all of the above reasons are possible, reason number 1 is "just the way it is", reason number 2 is of course "unfortunately not true" and reason number 3, although true and regretful, can be overcome, as you will see.
We at EZCertify see hundreds of the letters from the SBA to women business owners. This is just a sample of what we see:
- Most of these narratives lack the minimum level of specificity to be believable. They just don’t answer the following questions:
- When did the incident occur?
- Who was involved by name, title, and function within a named organization?
- What did they say or do to you that you believe constituted an act of gender
prejudice?
- How did you react when this act was committed against you?
- What was the measurable impact on your economic well being, your
professional advancement, preparation to enter into, and/or succeed in
your applicant business?
- Do you have any substantiating evidence of this incident, such as a letter
from a colleague that can corroborate what was said or done to you?
- Many women business owners confuse "unfortunate occurrences" with incidents of gender prejudice. These include, for example, being the only woman bidder, losing the contract bid, and assuming the rationale they lost the bid was due to her gender. Well, it might have been, but it won’t be seen that way by the SBA unless you relate the treatment to your gender in some tangible way
- More than a few women business owners claim bias or prejudice based on the size of their competitors, i.e. "the Lockheed-Martin syndrome" or the advantages that they lack as compared to other companies, "the contract we were chasing was awarded to an 8(a)”, so it must have been bias against me as a woman business owner"
- The narratives we see lack credibility because they are too academic, written as they were to be printed in a church newspaper versus on a police blotter, with all of the emotions that a scorned woman business owner should exhibit. This is the time to use the language that was used in the incident, as distasteful as it was, even those words that your mother would have washed your mouth out with soap, if appropriate
- The SBA, although rarely checking the voracity of your story, will look for ANY inconsistencies in your narrative and regard the entire narrative as suspect if your resume and the narrative don’t match in the facts presented, e.g. dates you worked at an employer being different on the resume versus the narrative, or you mistake the name of a person in the narrative, which is easy for the SBA to verify, versus stating, "to the best of my recollection", in those circumstances where you attempted to recall a name from 10 years ago. …and yes, you must name names!
- Many of the narratives we see just don’t go far enough in relating the unfavorable treatment of the woman applicant to being treated that way ONLY because of their gender. The bridge between the event and proving gender bias or prejudice must be paved with clearly overt sexual actions, words or inferences from a person that is in a power position relative to the woman, such as a supervisor, a prospective client or a person to whom the woman is applying for a loan, license, job, or access to some item, organization or location of business value to the woman
- Some of the narratives we see relate the experiences of other women in their organization or society in general, quoting from the hundreds of even verified studies and law suits involving gender prejudice and sexual harassment. Although serving some use in showing a pattern of chronic and persistence treatment of women in business, these references are largely ignored by SBA reviewers unless the woman applicant was a direct participant in these cases or the organization being cited was one that was the subject. The SBA wants your personal story and it must have taken place in the U.S. and not Iran, Saudi Arabia or any place else
- The SBA will often not credit you for the pain, suffering and equally important loss of income that results from you leaving a job, abusive spouse or even an incestuous household. They will insist that leaving was your decision and the subsequent loss of income was of your making, despite how unreasonable this logic may appear to you.
For the record, when we get the opportunity to prepare these narratives we initially get the same type of initial responses from our woman-owned business clients as we’ve just listed above. Knowing that the SBA will reject these stories, we provide our clients with our own Social Disadvantage Narrative Work Package. This document, designed to overcome the above issues, contains the answers to the following:
- Who is a socially disadvantaged individual?
- What do I do if I am not a member of a designated group?
- What generic evidence do I have to provide to prove my social disadvantage?
- How do I go about preparing the required social disadvantage narrative?
- Now that you’ve jogged my memory, how do I document my social disadvantage?
- OK, I’ve recalled my experiences, but what type of evidence of my claim will the SBA accept?
- What does a completed social disadvantage narrative look like?
- What is the definition of gender bias or prejudice?
Our woman-owned business clients provide us with the terse answers to the six questions identified above. EZCertify is responsible for creating the final narrative. We continue to work with each client until we know that the narrative shall be accepted by the SBA. If in our professional opinion, the narrative will not meet with the SBA's acceptance, and the client and we cannot improve it to a level at which we can ensure the acceptance of the narrative, we stop in the provision of what up to this time is a free service. In short, we do not accept applicants as clients unless we are very confident that we can get them certified and since the existence of a credible social disadvantage narrative is critical to a non-minority woman receiving her 8(a) certification, we focus on this subject up-front, before we accept an engagement to prepare an 8(a) application package for any non-minority woman.
You see, woman-owned businesses can finally get it, that is the 8(a) certification, and it all starts with a simple phone call!
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