AmEx Motivates Rich Ladies

According to their website, Make Mine a $Million Business™ has one goal: to help women-owned businesses surpass the million-dollar revenue mark.
Founded by Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence with OPEN from American Express, the program provides a combination of money, mentoring and marketing tools that women entrepreneurs need to help grow their businesses to a million dollars and beyond.
Lexi Reese, senior director of advocacy marketing for OPEN from American Express, spoke to Business Week about the program.

Q. Why do women need an outside push to get over that $1 million mark?
A. It’s not so much that they need a push, but that they need help gaining ground. We don’t always recognize that it wasn’t until 1975 — well within many of our lifetimes — that women won the right to have credit cards and open bank accounts in their own names, without a male co-signer. It’s only been since then that women have been able to gain economic independence on paper, create credit histories, and so forth. [Congress formally outlawed credit discrimination against women in a 1974 law that went into effect in 1975.]

1974? Can that be true? No wonder my mom dragged my dad to equal rights marches.
[via Caterina]

About David Burn

I wrote my first ad for a local political candidate when I was 17. She went on to win her race, and I felt the power of persuasive copy for the first time. Starting in Portland in 1995, I worked my way across the country as a copywriter and eventually became a content director making media products for big packaged goods brands. I returned to Oregon in 2008, and now I focus on building brands for companies that matter, including this one.