Investing in businesswomen will boost the economy for everyone, says Tory Burch, chief executive and designer, Tory Burch

Women’s empowerment will be front and centre in 2014 as more companies, communities and countries invest in women’s entrepreneurship. Increasingly, they recognise what organisations from the World Bank to Coca-Cola already know: that women are crucial to economic growth around the world.

Based on our experiences, women entrepreneurs see the world through a different lens and, in turn, do things differently (to my three brothers and three sons: not better, just differently). This is reflected in the kinds of businesses we start, whether it’s Coco Chanel, who learned the trade of a seamstress as a child, Estée Lauder, who turned a passion for skincare and make-up into a beauty empire, or Oprah Winfrey, whose media business focuses on helping women to reach their potential.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, there are 126m women operating new businesses and another 98m at the helm of established ones. Yet we face a huge equality gap. In only seven countries—Panama, Thailand, Ghana, Ecuador, Nigeria, Mexico and Uganda—do women take part in business at rates equal to men’s; in some countries, like Pakistan, they barely take part at all. Even when women are active business owners, they do not reach their potential: women own almost three in ten American firms, yet employ only 6% of the country’s workforce and account for barely 4% of business revenues.

I launched our company in 2004. I had a concept and, with the help of a small team, began developing it out of my apartment. As our company has grown, I’ve learned about the obstacles that women in business face, from balancing work and family (my greatest challenge) to securing financing. These are among the reasons why in 2009 we created the Tory Burch Foundation (TBF) to support the economic empowerment of women entrepreneurs. Drawing on our experiences as well as on conversations with businesswomen from Manhattan to Marrakesh, I see three priorities.

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