How Women Make Money: Inspirational Stories and Practical Advice from Successful Canadian Entrepreneurs

Barb Bloemhof is an assistant professor in the Department of Sport
Management at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

How Women Make Money is intended to tell the stories of Canadian women
entrepreneurs. It is written as part casebook, part how-to guide, and
part personal reflection on self-employment. It fails to carry off any
of these functions. The stories of the entrepreneurs are too brief to
provide a true insight into the vision, commitment, and effort of these
women; the tips provided are too vague to be practical; and even the
personal reflection tends to focus too much on others, such as the
author’s husband, who is neither an entrepreneur nor a woman.

The subject matter is treated quite superficially. Although the author
identifies as a self-employed entrepreneur in freelance writing, the
many trite and unsubstantiated generalizations show a profound lack of
understanding of her subject. Ironically, the style and grammatical
errors in the writing itself are distracting. The last part of the final
chapter is an afterthought that demonstrates an example of failing to
plan—not the message the author intended.

Reading between the lines raises issues that are worth exploring but
are ignored: self-employed women are a dramatically small proportion of
all employed women in Canada; women’s earnings at these endeavours are
substantially lower than men’s; a significant proportion of
self-employed persons do not choose to be self-employed. In the end, the
book fails to answer even the question implied in the title.