Business 2 min read By Callum Montgomery
Hedy Ratner helped open business lending to women in Chicago
Four decades after co-founding the Women’s Business Development Center in Chicago, Hedy Ratner says the work of expanding women’s access to business capital is not finished.
Four decades after helping to found the Women’s Business Development Center in Chicago, Hedy Ratner says the fight for women’s access to business capital is not yet over. The 85-year-old entrepreneur recalls a time when women seeking loans to start or expand their companies often could not secure financing without a man co-signing or vouching for them, a barrier that shaped who was able to build a business in the first place.
The Women’s Business Development Center was set up to close that gap by giving women practical support in the mechanics of running a company, from preparing business plans to approaching lenders. Ratner’s role in establishing the organisation placed her among the figures who pushed for a more level playing field in commercial finance at a time when the rules and attitudes of many lenders worked against female applicants.
Ratner’s reflections come at a point when she believes progress has been made but remains incomplete. Her message is that the original problem, women being treated as less creditworthy simply because of their gender, has not disappeared entirely, and that the institutions built to address it still have a role to play. Her view is that continued effort is needed so that access to capital depends on the strength of a business rather than on who is asking for it.
The organisation she helped create reflects a wider principle that has run through discussions about enterprise and finance: that opportunity is strongest when the qualifications of an applicant, rather than a personal characteristic, determine the outcome. Support networks of this kind have long been used to help founders navigate the process of securing funding, and their existence underlines how much of entrepreneurship depends on relationships, information and credibility in the eyes of lenders.
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