A ROOM OF HER OWN?

RUTH KLAHSEN was 47 when she started Monforte Dairy, an artisanal cheesemaking business in Stratford, Ont. Because she knew the business was too high risk to ever get a loan from a bank, she came up with an innovative way to fund a new dairy. Every customer could buy a future and, in return, they get a share of cheese. This year, she needs to make $2 million in sales and futures in order to make a profit.

Cheesemaking was historically women’s work, as it was part of the farm family’s diet. But when it moved from farm to factory in the late 1800s, men took over. It wasn’t until about 15 years ago, when an artisanal cheese movement was born in Ontario, that women reclaimed the hairnets and the cheese moulds.

Klahsen, now 60, finds it hard to describe what she feels when she sees a cow with a calf, a mare

with her foal or a ewe with her lamb. “There is nothing more that makes me smile than something suckling,” she says. “It’s just something that is part of our DNA.”

Women-run businesses have always clustered in retail and personal services related to food, health and beauty. In 2016, a little more than half of the early-stage entrepreneurial activity by Canadian women was in consumer services, while business services, which tend to be more profitable and stable, were next at 28.2 per cent, according to the latest Global Entrepreneur Monitor Canada report on Women’s Entrepreneurship, published in December 2017.

For established businesses more than 3.5 years old, the split was about 40-40, with the rest of the businesses in the “transformative sector” (manufacturing) and extraction (natural resources).

“Entrepreneurship is part of the overall economy and labour market, and so we’re seeing the same patterns in gender segregation that we see in traditional employment,” explains University of Alberta’s Hughes.

The big surprise was the more detailed global data that showed Canada had the highest concentration of early-stage, women-led businesses in the information and communication technology sector at 7.6 per cent, with the next highest activity rate of 5.5 per cent in the U.K. and 4.4 per cent in Ireland, which is good news for a knowledge-based economy.

For Klahsen, who has seen three new farm-based dairies run by men open within a 20-minute drive in the past five years, cash flow is still a struggle after all these years.

The copycat competition bugs her, and she sees the parallel between the decline of cheesemaking on the farm and her situation today. “When it looks viable as a business, men get interested.”