It's official. This year, for the first time, women tipped the scales, making up the majority of the nation's workforce. And that's not all. According to The Atlantic's July/August cover story, most managers are women, and the ratio of female to male college graduates in 2010 will be three to one, giving women advantages in the workplace.

The Northwest Colorado Business Development Center has been tracking these kinds of trends and as a result is offering an all-day Women's Small Business Conference in Breckenridge Friday.

“We have a network that identifies certain areas in the small business world that seem to be growing,” said Jack Taylor, director of Small Business Development Center. “One that's growing right now is women's small businesses — in at least the last two years ... Women-owned businesses are by far leading the pack.”

The conference includes a CEO panel, which will address the “peaks and valleys of running your own business,” a finance panel reviewing funding options and a variety of workshops addressing social media for business, hot topics in employment law, how to be a government vendor, loan applications, procurement bid match and step-by-step successful contracts. Brain Schwartz will attend the event to discuss the five distinctions of successful entrepreneurs and give out free copies of his book, “50 Interviews with Entrepreneurs.”

“This is going to be a great day of seminars ... about what it really takes to run a good organization,” Taylor said. “Any business owner is going to get something out of it ... This is just a huge opportunity for small business owners to learn about what resources are available to them.”

And, it's not limited to business owners, or women; anyone thinking about starting a business is welcome, as are men.

“We are allowing testosterone,” Taylor said in good humor.

What women want

The event also features two keynote speakers: Sasha Galbraith, a partner with Jay Galbraith Management Consultants, Ltd., and Carol Hedges, a senior fiscal analyst with the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute. Hedges will talk about upcoming budget hurdles on the state level, while Galbraith will discuss how women tend to organize businesses different than men, and why that's important.

Galbraith holds a master's in business administration from the University of Southern California, has worked in commercial real estate and as the vice president of Wells Fargo Bank for 10 years, and has been a consultant in organizational design for the last 20 years. She lives in Breckenridge.

Within her consulting, she began looking at organizations women ran, and how they differed from male-dominated companies; her interest piqued when she kept reading reports about women leaving corporate jobs, even when they achieved high positions.

Within her research, she found quite a few differences.

She said women tend to “use communication more freely, openly and multi-directionally,” explaining that they don't adhere to traditional top-down orders but rather communicate laterally, across all ranks. She also said they have a charismatic and transformational leadership style, wherein they try to “inspire troops to work for the greater good — a goal bigger than themselves.”

“Women tend to have a different notion of fairness,” she further explained, saying they consider the context of a situation, such as a worker's illness, rather than adhere to rigid rules.

She also discovered many women leave the corporate world because they find the culture “unfriendly or uninviting” and would rather work for themselves, a nonprofit or a more respectful environment.

“It's kind of like a right-handed person being asked to write with her left hand, between 8 and 5,” she said. ‘It's the reason a lot of women are quitting organizations.”

She also talked about the subtle discrimination against women, particularly when it comes to promotions.

“The bottom line is, you can't alienate half of the population,” she said. “(When corporations become more women-friendly), they attract and retain more women, and it also makes the organization a lot more fun for men, because as it turns out, they really like to have flexible hours too.”

And, as women begin to own more companies and use their purchasing power, corporations will benefit from being “female-friendly,” she said.

Beyond her talk, Galbraith said the conference will give women “a great opportunity to network with other women and see what worked for them and what hasn't worked. It's the power of the masses, so to speak.”

She added that all of the speakers aim to give participants practical tools and “bits of knowledge that they can implement.”