County Ranks High in Firms Owned by Minority Women

Orange County ranks seventh in the nation in the number of businesses owned by minority women.

That was one of the findings of a recent study by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners, a Silver Spring, Md., trade group.

In 1996, the county was home to 24,500 minority women-owned firms, three times as many as in 1987, the survey found. Only the Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Chicago, Houston and Washington metropolitan regions ranked higher.

In terms of sales generated by those businesses, Orange County was fifth in the nation, with a total of $6.64 billion in 1996. The firms had an average of about two employees.

Many women have started their own businesses after being “downsized and outsized” from larger corporations, said Karen Herb, president of the Orange County chapter of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners, a sister organization of the NFWBO.

But women are also encouraged because they’ve seen other female entrepreneurs make inroads in fields not traditionally associated with women, such as manufacturing and agriculture.

One business owner who figured in the findings is Alice Lei, who started her Huntington Beach firm, Nightengale Technology, in 1994. She and three employees do research and development for advanced transportation systems, such as using satellites and sensors to track traffic patterns.

Lei, an Asian American with an aerospace background, said she still must overcome people’s initial reluctance to accept a woman as an engineer. “Once they get to know you, it’s easy,” she said.

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Patrice Apodaca covers economic issues for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-5979 and at patrice.apodaca@latimes.com