Attorney Sheela Murthy Featured in Newsweek
Posted Nov 15, 2005
©MurthyDotCom
Attorney Murthy was featured in Newsweek magazine in a Nov 14, 2005 article on women, immigrant entrepreneurs.
Made In America
Watch out, Bill Gates. Women who immigrate to the West are finding success in their new homelands by starting their own businesses.
by Sarah Childress
Newsweek International
Nov. 14, 2005 issue - Sheela Murthy, who moved to the United States from India in 1986, had worked only a few years at a New York law firm when she glimpsed her own glass ceiling. "It just felt like, 'Why am I here at 2 in the morning, photocopying documents?' " she says. Murthy remembers thinking of the American Dream, "If this is really real, why don't I pluck some of the golden fruit?" After trying another firm in Baltimore, she started her own, specializing in immigration law. For a month she sat at home, making cold calls. Eleven years later, her firm had swelled to 11 lawyers. Now Murthy's found her dream job — and is making more money than she ever had at the copy machine.
Immigrant women are steadily carving out space for themselves in the world's biggest economies. In the past decade, the number of immigrant women business owners in the United States exploded by nearly 200 percent, according to a study by the Immigration Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The percentage of self-employed immigrant women is higher than the corresponding number of self-employed native-born women, and they're even closing the gap with immigrant men. Their entrepreneurialism is partly pragmatic: by working on their own terms, immigrant women can earn extra money without struggling in a hostile workplace or worrying about child care. But it's also a sign of a changing world. More female immigrants have better education and skills than before, and it is increasingly acceptable for them to work outside the home.
Most of their businesses are small start-ups in which women sell products they learned to make in their native countries. That's how Ofelia Nieto, 39, a Colombian refugee who arrived in the United States with her family two years ago, became an entrepreneur. She started selling handmade necklaces to her California neighbors to help pay the bills. Now she hawks her wares at local fairs, hotels and boutiques — and is working on expanding online. Others manage day-care services, or run restaurants and beauty salons. And increasingly, women are expanding into other industries, like real estate, tech consulting and even construction.
What drives a newcomer to an unfamiliar land to start her own business? Susan Pearce, who conducted the Immigration Policy Center's study, says lower-class women are often "pushed" into entrepreneurship when they find they need more than one job to support a family. Those who don't speak the language can't find a job in the traditional workplace. Women from wealthy, educated families are "pulled" by the promise of fulfilling dreams they could never have realized in their native countries.
Banks and other groups are recognizing the potential and reaching out. In the past, most women got start-up capital from family members. Thanks to anti-discrimination provisions and micro-enterprise loans for small businesses, that's starting to change. Nonprofit groups have stepped in to help immigrant business owners. Several state chapters of the International Rescue Committee in the United States, for example, offer micro-enterprise programs that help with everything from making business cards and setting up a Web site to securing loans and customers.
Governments elsewhere have started to reach out, too, with programs to help would-be entrepreneurs navigate foreign regulations and to offer support. When Nousha Pakpour, who is now in her 60s, immigrated to England from Iran in 1978, she left behind two hair salons and her own hairdressing school. But with broken English and no work visa, the best she could manage in London was a job shampooing hair and sweeping the floors. Eventually she turned to fashion, obtained a loan from the British government and opened a boutique. It was a thriving business for four years, until she abandoned it to start the Lady's Creative Centre, an organization that helps immigrant women tap into their own creative talent to form businesses.
U.S. experts predict that the number of women entrepreneurs will only continue to rise, strengthening the support network for other newcomers. "It's not only their success that's important to the economy, it's the trickle-down," says Pearce. "They're employing people, ensuring that we have an educated, healthy next generation that's going to grow up and commit to our labor force." Chances are, they'll be doing a lot more than making photocopies.
With Silvia Spring in London
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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