Female Business Owners Say Borrowing Is Tough : Discrimination: Only 7.5% of their firms are at highest risk of failing. But tell that to their bankers.

WASHINGTON — Female business owners are just as likely as their male counterparts to pay their bills on time and stay in business--but they say getting banks to recognize this is still their greatest challenge.

Of the estimated 7.7 million women-owned businesses in the United States, 85.3% have a low to moderate chance of failing, compared to 86.2% of all firms, according to a report by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners and Dun & Bradstreet Information Services.

But when the female business owners group asked its members whether they had problems in working with their financial institutions, two-thirds of the 1,071 respondents said they did. Further, a third said they “perceive some degree of gender-based discrimination.”

The group found that only 7.5% of women-owned businesses run the highest risk of going out of business, roughly the same percentage as all U.S. businesses. The study used payment history and other data from the Census Bureau, Small Business Administration and Internal Revenue Service to rank businesses on a five-point scale on their likelihood of going out of business within 18 months.

According to Dun & Bradstreet, about a third of women-owned companies and U.S. firms pay on time. More than half of the women-owned businesses pay their bills within 30 days. In fact, less than 10% of women-owned firms are at the highest credit risk level.

Female business owners “are just as financially credit-worthy, yet they say they still have trouble getting access to capital,” said Julie R. Weeks, research director for the National Foundation for Women Business Owners. “Women business owners are the fastest-growing area of the economy. Wouldn’t it be in the best interest of the national economy to remove those barriers?”

“We have a pretty good track record,” said Janice Carmichael, who owns the Janice Communications Group, a Washington strategic business and marketing firm. “The statistics show that. This discrimination doesn’t fly anymore. Women are doing well.”

Bankers deny that a business loan applicant’s sex affects their decisions. “I can’t imagine anyone doing that,” said Jeffrey R. Springer, president of Citizens Bancorp of Laurel, Md. “If anything, I think everyone is going out of their way to be objective. There’s no reason to differentiate.”

But Judy B. Rosener, a professor at the University of California at Irvine’s Graduate School of Management, said the disparate treatment female business owners say they get from bankers may not be the result of conscious discrimination. Some banks continue to treat female business owners differently from men because society still has not accepted the idea that women can be successful in business, she said.

“It has to do with those stereotypes that are so deeply held,” said Rosener, who has studied women in business. “Banks understand men. They can predict their behavior. . . . They don’t say they are discriminating, but they have the discretion if you are male to pay less attention” to the details of the loan application.

In some cases, even successful female business owners have been required to have their husbands guarantee their loans. For example, Juanita Ohanian, had been operating Nebel Printing Inc., a Rockville, Md., commercial offset printing and photocopying business, for 12 years when she applied to First Women’s National Bank in Rockville--a women-owned institution--for a loan to expand the business five years ago. The business was financially secure and Ohanian was making twice the salary of her husband, a Food and Drug Administration microbiologist. But the bank still wanted her husband’s signature on the loan.

“I was appalled,” Ohanian said. “Not only did they require his signature, they didn’t even treat it as a commercial loan. If they didn’t know what sex you are and just looked at your financial statements, I don’t think that would happen.”

Ohanian got the loan instead from Maryland National Bank, now part of NationsBank, where she had a 10-year relationship.

Still, Courtney Price, co-founder of Premier Fasttrac, a national entrepreneurial training program based in Denver, said banks may have had good reason to reject loan applications from female business owners.

Women have only recently become more savvy about applying for loans and submitting a complete financial plan to the bank, she said.

“From a bank’s perspective, they haven’t looked at women-owned businesses as being good credit risks because often they don’t have sound business plans,” Price said. “It shows if someone has done their homework. Men have learned that.”