These are the findings from a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Using data from the Fed’s Small Business Credit Survey, the study found gaps in:

Decreases in revenue and jobs

  • A larger percentage of small businesses owned by people of color (89 percent) and women (91 percent) reported a decrease in revenue during the pandemic, relative to White- and men-owned firms (82 percent each).
  • More than half of firms owned by people of color (54 percent) and women (63 percent) reported employment decreases. For White- and men-owned firms, that percentage was less than half (49 percent and 48 percent, respectively).

Access to Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funding

  • Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of White-owned firms reported receiving all the PPP funding for which they applied, compared with 54 percent of firms owned by people of color.
  • While 75 percent of men-owned firms reported receiving the full amount of PPP funding they wanted, for women-owned firms that figure was 64 percent.
  • One in 10 women-owned firms reported receiving none of the PPP financing they sought, facing higher rates of rejection than firms owned by men and people of color.

Future expectations

  • About half of firms owned by people of color and 55 percent of women-owned firms reported expecting their revenue to decrease in the 12 months following the survey, compared with 45 percent of White- and men-owned firms.
  1. Note: Since this report’s release, changes have been made to the Small Business Credit Survey 2020 weighting scheme, which now more accurately reflects methods used in prior vintages of the data set. While the values in this report have not been updated, we don’t expect differences from the new weighting scheme to change the conclusions drawn in this report. However, we advise against comparing values from this report with values in other SBCS products for which the weighting scheme has been updated. For more information, please reference the data appendix for the SBCS 2021 Report on Employer Firms at www.fedsmallbusiness.org/survey.
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