 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the second session of the breakout panels. I am joined here by two student presenters, as well as the respondent, Jill Finlayson. What I'm going to do is I'm going to introduce everyone all at once. Then we're going to move to the presentations. After the presentations, Jill will give her feedback to the students, and then we will open for audience Q&A. First, I'm going to introduce Jill Finlayson. She is the Director of Expanding Diversity and Gender Equity and Tech Initiative at UC Berkeley, also called EDGE and Tech. It's co-sponsored by Citrus, the Berkeley Engineering Department, and there are also stations at Davis, Santa Cruz, and Merced campuses. The EDGE and Tech Initiative supports research and initiatives to promote the equitable participation of women in the tech industry. Jill has a strong background in strategy, entrepreneurship, and mentorship. Prior to Berkeley, she led mentorship and developed and delivered incubator and accelerator programs for singularity university ventures, whose mission is to increase the number of impact-focused startups to educate, inspire, and empower leaders. The first student presenter is Erin. Her topic is Worthy Enough, California Relief Grants Battling Gendered Unemployment in the Pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic, unlike others, has had a disproportionate effect on women in both employment and ownership sectors. California has poured billions into the economic recovery of its businesses, but that still hasn't been enough to help all businesses. Erin's presentation will highlight the ways that the Cal Relief Grants continue to allow many businesses to slip through the cracks, and the trickle-down effect that it had on female unemployment and business ownership during the pandemic. The second student presenter would be Allison. Oh, I forgot to mention the Internship Office. So Erin's Internship Office was Senator Mike McGuire. Allison was at the California Department of Public Health. Her research topic is Party Planning Businesses You Absolutely Need to Know About. As the COVID-19 cases surged throughout 2020, birthday parties, weddings, and all sorts of celebrations were canceled. This is a study on how small businesses owned and operated by Latinx women within the event planning industry manage mental health challenges amidst COVID-19 closures. So now we will begin with Erin's presentation. Hello, I'm Erin, and I'm really excited to share my research from this summer with you today. Just an intro, my path to my research question. I was seeing a lot of reports in late 2020 around December about the disproportionate unemployment that was happening during the pandemic that was affecting women. And I wanted to sort of investigate that further. I wanted to see what sort of aspects of the pandemic led to an increased unemployment for women, why that was irregular, and sort of see whether or not that trend was reflected. I was seeing nationwide reports wanted to see whether or not that was more reflected in California and whether or not that was mostly a trend of big corporations or small businesses or where all of that was coming from. So the research question that I wanted to address is sort of a two-part question. The question is what effect did the pandemic have on female unemployment and business ownership and did government assistance to small businesses help curb these effects? Most of the responses in the pandemic to the economy were to small businesses. So I figured investigating small businesses would also assist in helping to address the question of unemployment as well. So for the methodology I used in this project, I mostly relied on a literature review of news articles and other writing from journals that was coming out, studies that were being published at the time, and also some government databases relying on real pandemic data statistics and that kind of thing. These are sort of a list of all the sources that I've used and you'll see some of the data from these different sources come into play later in my presentation. So some background information. What happens in a normal recession? A study published by the National Bureau of Economics Research explains that female unemployment isn't usually as affected by economic depressions as male unemployment. They attribute this in part to women's role in the family often as a supplemental income as well as composition in the labor force. So of all women in the workforce, roughly 40% are employed by counter cyclical industries. These include industries like government, education, healthcare. Those do not usually experience high unemployment during normal recessions and male unemployment in these sectors conversely is around 20%. And this is in contrast to highly cyclical industries such as manufacturing, construction and trade. These account for around 50% of all male employment and make up around 24% of female employment and are highly fluctuating based on the cycles of the economy. So this recession has been quite different. The industries hit hardest by closures had a large impact on female unemployment. These numbers are from the California Employment and Development Department. So in Los Angeles County, the average difference of employment between March and April 2020, this first crucial month of the pandemic was a decrease of 15.65%. Whereas these industries highlighted below are more female dominated industries and had much higher rates of closure. So leisure and hospitality, accommodation and food service, arts and entertainment and recreation all experienced closures of more than 40%. Child and daycare services decreased in employment by 32.5%. And female dominated retail industries, clothing and accessories decreased by over 50%. And it's not just unemployment. This is from the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research between the first between the months of February and April 2020, roughly 1.4 million women owned businesses closed permanently. And I would be remiss if I didn't also include that minority owned businesses faced incredibly disparate amounts of closures. Like black owned businesses closed at rates of 41% during these two crucial months Latinx businesses decreased ownership decreased by 32%. AAPI business ownership decreased by 26%. This is all compared to white business ownership, which decreased by only 17%. And intersectionality is definitely important to account for in this because women of color faced the most difficult challenges in the pandemic receiving loans, which we'll get to later. So why this disparity between both female unemployment and female business ownership? Possible explanations that I've come across are daycare services as both a cause and a symptom of female unemployment, the ability to telecommute and the industries that were hit hardest by the pandemic. So to go further. These numbers are from the Pew Research Center, childcare responsibilities both faced high closures in a female dominated industry. So previously women who provided childcare services faced high numbers of unemployment as we saw before, but this also resulted in more issues for women who needed to rely on childcare responsibilities in order to conduct their own careers during the pandemic. So during the pandemic, we saw that 50% of mothers felt they couldn't give full attention to their work because of childcare responsibilities and 30% reduced their hours or left their jobs during the pandemic. I also just want to note that there is sort of a trend in social sciences to generalize that something affects women when more accurately it would be to state that it affects mothers. And I think that just noting that childcare and the responsibilities that fell on women because of childcare and mother specifically played a huge role in female unemployment numbers in the pandemic. Additionally, the National Bureau of Economic Research explained that within occupations where telecommuting is an option, they did not quote observe the pattern of usual recessions that women are more protected for men than men from unemployment loss. So the ability to talk commute was also a hindrance in job retention for women during the pandemic. And so now going to talk about business closures and California and the Newsome administration really pushed response to business closures with through the Cal Relief grants. Just to overview what the Cal Relief grants were and who was eligible. Small businesses as defined could apply to receive grant aid during the pandemic ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. Overall funding totaled an estimated $4 billion over the multiple rounds of funding that that they issued. And businesses were eligible based on their annual revenue given priority to base businesses based on how they were affected by COVID-19 due to region and business sector. So these programs tried to aid sort of the disproportionate closures that we saw in female dominated sectors. But still some sectors faced a lot of difficulty achieving these grants and still with those grants found it difficult to stay afloat with all of the closures. So this is a case study, an interview that I sourced from an article for Cal Matters about the closures affected affecting women during the pandemic and specifically female dominated industries. So hair salons were a great example of the type of businesses that experienced really lengthy closures during the pandemic and were not really able like retail to pivot to an online business model. And the owner of this salon says about receiving loans that they make it so complicated they're constantly changing the rules. I mean, it's a nightmare and Russell Salon kind of had to fight to the nail to stay open but was lucky enough to retain their business after receiving both a Cal Relief Grant and a federal PPP loan. And this quote is from the LA Times so far this is from round one so far 198,000 small businesses and nonprofits have or will been awarded grants during the first round of the program. State officials estimate that around 180,000 applications will remain unfunded. So this is from early in the program, but it's still staggering numbers that almost half of the applications went unfunded during probably the most crucial time of the pandemic when closures were high and customers were scarce. The problem with the program that a lot of businesses were encountering was an oversaturated infrastructure that was unable to provide adequate support for business owners, whether or not there was sort of a push for equity and loan disbursement. A lot of businesses were still unable to either because of financial literacy access to internet access to resources and financial advising, we're not really able to access these loans in the most equitable manner. So these quotes are from these quotes down here are from the reddit slash small businesses in post about the small the Cal Relief Grants. One business owner complained that the applications were quote absolute nightmare interface and others added that the website was complete disaster would not allow them to completely upload all of their necessary documents to qualify, because everyone would kind of use the infrastructure at the same time and it wasn't able to support the amount of traffic that it sort of needed in order to help everyone. So some conclusions from my project pandemic the pandemic created far too great a need to support for support from any government assistance to fully accommodate the closures. Industries hit hardest by the pandemic have put more more women out of work than any previous economic crisis and the relief grant efforts were not enough to keep businesses alive and trickle down support to employees, especially in female dominated industries who could not pivot to an online format addressing sector specific closures as the Cal Relief Grants tried to do only focused on one issue caused by the pandemic and did not address other gender specific issues relating to childcare and the ability to work remotely and female dominated industries and their employees will be feeling the effects of the pandemic for many years to come. So thank you. I want to thank Countsack and the CRB team and everyone for their guidance in this project. We will now go to Allison. So my name is Allison I usually her pronouns like Nicole said I'm a fourth year studying public health and public policy. And I really wanted to investigate how Latina owned businesses and their mental health challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. So just a little bit about my motivations behind the study I was living in Southern California during the pandemic so I was able to witness how business closures really impacted small business. And this led to my focus on Orange Riverside and San Bernardino counties and more importantly than just being physically located in Southern California during 2020. My own family business was required to shut down for a few months during 2020 and that really sparked my interest in really investigating the individual experiences, not only with entrepreneurship but the policy challenges that COVID-19 brought forward. And in addition I've been fortunate enough to participate in two qualitative research studies one through the Berkeley School of Public Health and one through the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies. And both of these research studies really focused on qualitative interviews so I wanted to hone in on this skill. And I really structured my interview around these prior experiences and I wanted to do a deeper dive into mental health challenges such as stress anxiety cultural norms and financial barriers. So just a little bit about what I want to address today. I want to go over the Hispanic population within the Orange County and Inland Empire area. The intersection between COVID-19 and small businesses, two different case studies of small businesses within Southern California and how we can move forward and support Latina entrepreneurs in the future. So just a little bit about the Hispanic population within Orange County. You can see that the Hispanic community makes up 32.2% of the entire county and that is the second most populous ethnic group within that region. When we look at Riverside County we see that the Hispanic population is actually the majority at 46.7% and similarly when we look at San Bernardino we see that the Hispanic population is over 50% of the entire county. So what does this mean? Overall we can see that the Hispanic community and the ethnic group overall is very well represented within Southern California at 32.2%, 46.7%, and 50.6%. These are obviously a very large portion of the county population so it's important to keep in mind when we enact county policies, state policies, local policies. They have a direct impact on these underrepresented communities and for legislators, you know, large businesses, private interests, public interests. It's important to keep this kind of ethnic breakdown in mind when we think about policy grant programs and really any kind of business plan we want to implement moving forward. So now I really want to address COVID-19 and the interaction it had with small businesses and more importantly how pandemic closures impacted small businesses such as Latina business owners. So more specifically I want to address the intersection of female entrepreneurs and policy implications such as the unintended consequences of COVID-19 and how that really did have an impact on not only the mental health of all small business owners but in this case particularly Latina owned businesses. So just a little bit about women and business in the, like the numbers of women in business. Women owned firms represent 37.2% of all businesses within the state of California and they generate over 5% of the state's total business revenue. California also has the most minority owned businesses across the entire country and overall with all these numbers we can see that supporting women and supporting women in business is very impactful not just for the economy of California but also just the economy of the entire nation as a whole. So it's really important that we as you know just society as legislators as people in private interest we learn how we can better support women and move our economy forward as we seek to rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic. So I kind of want to go over the COVID-19 policy timeline and the rollout and how that impacted small businesses. On March 4th Governor Gavin Newsom had declared a state of emergency within California. A few days later March 7th the Riverside Public Health Officer had declared a local health emergency. By March 11th the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic. A few days later March 17th Orange County had banned large public and private gatherings and by March 19th Governor Newsom had announced a statewide shelter at home order. So obviously we can see from March 4th to March 19th that's a very short amount of time for so many policy you know introductions and small businesses minority owned women owned. They did not have the time to adapt to all the changes these policies had and it was very challenging for a lot of women and a lot of businesses to kind of grapple with the changes that the new policies brought forward. So as we can all infer Latina businesses were not immune to pandemic closures. Many women were forced to temporarily shut down their business while unfortunately others had to permanently shut down. And for all business owners particularly Latina entrepreneurs there were a lot of mental health challenges that resulted from the pandemic and these policy rollouts. So now I really want to do a deeper dive into the mental health impacts the COVID-19 policy rollout had and I did two case studies for my research project and now I'm going to explain those all to you. So the first business I looked into was called magnificent balloons. The owner was a 20 year old new business owner. She operates primarily within the inland empire. And as you can see in the photo her business is primarily making balloon garlands for special events. Here are just a few more photos so you kind of understand more of what she was doing. So in our interview she shared that she had a really unique experience with COVID-19. She actually contracted the virus in the early stages of the pandemic. And because of her experience with COVID-19 in particular she has a lot of new anxieties surrounding her business that have really impacted the way she goes about her business model. She's implemented a lot of new health and safety policies. And even though gatherings are no longer banned within Orange County and inland empire. She still has a lot of safety measures in place to stop the spread of disease and protect herself from protect her employees. So really just her experience with COVID increased her exposure to anxiety and it kind of created space for mental health challenges within her business that she didn't have to take into account before. In addition to her own individual experience with the virus she shared that she's had a lot of additional financial stressors that have arisen because of changes in pricing for a lot of the products she was able to get before the pandemic. She shared that a lot of the goods are more expensive now. There are a lot of shipping delays because of international kind of supply that she isn't able to really control. And overall she is just making less profit than she was before because things are more expensive. She has to wait longer for her products to arrive. And these new financial stressors have overall just prolonged her exposure to stress and anxiety. And these were mental health challenges that she did not have before the pandemic. So moving on to the next business I interviewed. It was called Deluxe Floresta. The owner again was a new business owner. She was 30 years old and she operated primarily in Orange County. Before the pandemic she did mainly picnic tables for special events. So you can see in the picture they're just kind of like aesthetic like picnic sets for small little events. But because of the pandemic she kind of had to switch her business model and now she does more like floral arrangements like you can see here. So for weddings, birthdays, whatever you can really think of. And similar to the first case study I just shared with all of you. The owner of this business also shared that things are just more expensive now. She's having a harder time getting the supplies she was able to get beforehand. It's cutting into her profits and it's really adding to the stress she feels as a business owner. One thing I really want to highlight about this business is she did look for programs, aid programs from the government. But because she is a very new business she wasn't eligible for a lot of programs such as PPP loans. And even when she did find a program that she was eligible for there are a lot of bureaucratic barriers that prevented her from applying. Applications were very long. They were very dense. She didn't understand them and she didn't really know who to go to to get help and assistance for these applications. So there were a lot of barriers that prevented her from kind of addressing the stress she was experiencing as a business owner. So moving forward I want to address how we can support diversity within entrepreneurship and more importantly the role of policy, private interest and civil society overall. So as we can see there are a lot of policies enacted during the pandemic that obviously needed to be implemented. But these policies also had adverse effects on minority owned businesses and Latina owned businesses. So as we seek to kind of rebuild the economy and move forward it's important to address how new policies need to be implemented that can aid minority owned businesses. And a lot of people before me today and also right now are discussing the role of social equity programs within the public and private sector. And I just wanted to highlight how we can potentially use these models and implement them to aid future women in their entrepreneurial journey and kind of help us rebuild the economy. And overall just learning as a society how we can address mental health as a legitimate policy issue and encourage our legislators to have a discourse around the role of policy and mental health. And how we can address certain stigmas within communities of color that prevent addressing mental health challenges and how overall we can come together and not only support women of color by buying their products and supporting businesses. But how we can really help communities of color prevail against policy issues and really just support everyone as we move to rebuild the economy from the pandemic. But that was everything for me. Yeah. If you have any questions feel free to send me an email. Thank you. We will now turn it over to Jill our respondent to give feedback to the students on their presentations and their research. You can sit there. Perfect. Can you hear. Awesome. So I want to thank you both for your presentations today. I really appreciated the amount of research and data that goes into telling these stories as well as the case studies which really helped people connect to the real world experience that people have had. You know when you talked Aaron I like the fact that you gave the comparison to the prior recessions right like why was this one so different. Why did it impact people so different. And I think that's really helpful to level set and get people clear on why this was such a different experience. I like from there that you focused on the sectors that were impacted and you know thinking about also that that lack of teleporting telecommuting and being able to think about retail. But in person was hindered online wasn't but who was employed in those two different sectors is really relevant. The I also liked on a couple of things that you touched on and kind of my takeaway from your presentation is more questions right. There's only so much you can cover in the time. Yeah exactly that there's what you can cover in the time but it prompts some questions like why were the amounts set at 5 K to 25 K. What was the logic behind that. What did they have any basis in what people's actual needs were who got the higher end who got the lower end you know questions like that. Just briefly the lower amounts were for smaller businesses and the higher amounts were for larger small businesses and based on their own revenue streams. But to keep it equitable to their business models I suppose but still I don't think it took into account a lot of different things regarding the size of the company and the composition of who worked in those companies. Exactly and I think that raises the question of where was the need greater. They focused on who was employing other people as opposed to single entrepreneurs without any employees where this was their sole source of income. And they didn't have employees maybe their revenues were smaller but it was more essential right. So if you looked at it from a need based perspective would there be a different criteria. So I think that's one of the things to take away from your presentation is really questioning the assumptions right questioning the criteria that was used and then asking if that was the right criteria. Is there other criteria. It also caused me to think about what data we had and what data we didn't have when they develop these policies were they thinking about how entrepreneurship was distributed right across these different populations and what were the different types of businesses because if they understood you know the size of the pie that was being impacted by you know individual entrepreneurs. Maybe they would have reflected on a policy specific for that audience right. I think the failed infrastructure is really interesting question as well when you start to think about you know who has the time to sit there and fill out these forms who has the social capital and the navigational capital to go out and get support in figuring out these online programs and then the financial capital right who knows the people at the bank who can help them fill this out and who feels comfortable even going into the bank and having those conversations and what are the required documents. Why are those the required documents how difficult is it to get those required documents. Businesses that opened before they had sort of a year to collect tax forms on that business were not eligible for the loans because they didn't have any sort of tax records for their business. So that include like business new businesses are already struggling and now they're not eligible. So yeah you try to encourage entrepreneurship. Yeah and you don't support new entrepreneurship. And what's important to think about in both of your cases is the fact that the pandemic didn't really create necessarily new problems. It exacerbated existing problems right. It's shown a light on gaps where we weren't providing support and assistance in the first place to your point about like new entrepreneurs were not providing an ecosystem that provides support. There was just an article from Ann Marie Slaughter called renewal. Take a look at it because part of what she's championing in there is that everybody should have the ability and right to innovate but that some people have you know friends and family with means who can support them and others do not. So how can the government play a role in providing safety nets and almost a trampoline so you can try and you can still bounce back right. You can have that second chance. The other thing I wanted to touch on for you was childcare. So you you mentioned that as both a symptom and a cause and I think that that's really huge. So another thing to think about from policy recommendations. So when you present like this is like what's next right is to think about how can we create a safety net for childcare. That's fundamental across the board for women in all sorts of jobs. And there is a huge gap there where we don't have any sort of standard or support. So when women have to deal with kids at home it's obviously cutting into their ability to work much more so than it has impacted the men unfortunately. And single parents that was another thing I don't think you touched on but that's another group that you know is forced to be innovative and entrepreneurial to pay the bills. And so how do we really support single parents as part of that child care conversation as well. Alison. So what I liked about yours is if the focus on public health and mental health it's something that's often quite overlooked. And in this period of time we're all experienced collective trauma. Right. It's not just individual trauma. It's a collective trauma and it's a compounded trauma. We had me to we have Black Lives Matter. We have Asian hate. We had refugees. We had like literally one thing on top of another. And so people are feeling very impacted. And there are also loss of control. Right. Like and so this COVID and the impact on these businesses like they lost the control of their income. They lost the control to even make some of the decisions around the financial inclusion. You're you know your point about unintended consequences like they had to take these policies in place for the health of the larger community. But now that we've been through this what do we learn from this experience how do we do things differently going forward or what supports should we be putting into place right now. There was an article that was saying that let me find this quote because it's quite interesting. According to a survey of 1200 women business owners nearly half of these new businesses started during the pandemic were started by women of color. They were more than twice as likely to have started a business out of economic need. So this isn't ending. Right. Like this isn't like OK pandemic happened and now we're coming out of it and everything's going to be OK. It's we need to start thinking about these new businesses that are starting out of need right now. What do they need. How can we support them. We need to be actively interacting and being intentional about these new businesses that are coming into the floor. And what do we think about you know entrepreneurship that's you know started out of need. And what difference do they need as opposed to people who elect to start a company. Let's see. I was also curious about when you talk about mental health and anxiety and compounding anxiety. What do you see as opportunities for government to intervene in those areas. Yeah. One of the things I really wanted to explore within this project was kind of how policy when we use it to address public health issue we generally tend to think of physical health something like a communicable disease or you know something chronic that you go to a doctor and you get diagnosed for. But I think mental health and particularly mental health within communities of color is very much taboo. It's not addressed you know being like a Hispanic woman myself. Mental health isn't something that I grew up discussing with my family and things like that. So I think anxiety is something that a lot of business owners carry and they don't understand how to kind of engage in dialogue and discourse about it. So one of the things I really wanted to get across with this study was just kind of encouraging legislators and interest groups and just you know we as like general people you know kind of engaging in these conversations about how anxiety impacts you know me as an individual or someone as a business owner engaging in these conversations in addressing how we can potentially craft policies that create access to support programs because they're not always accessible especially for communities of color. Yeah I think that's a really interesting point when you think about the small business association right. They provide resources for people starting companies. Could mental health resources be part of what they provide. Could they provide classes. They provide access. I know you know access to small businesses is actually kind of a holy grail for a lot of businesses like they want to reach entrepreneurs and founders of small businesses but they're hard to reach because they're working 24 seven right. They're working into the evenings. They're not in they're not congregating in one place where you can go talk to them. At one point I was working on a startup that was interested in this area and they would try to partner with Costco because a lot of small businesses have to go buy in bulk there which reminded me about you know the point about supplies right the cost of supplies. Is there something the government could do to buy in bulk to reduce the impact of the increased costs or the delays in the supply chain. What is the role there and is there an opportunity. I also think about Detroit so Detroit Michigan when the car industry went blew up. They actually went through and they removed as much red tape as they could from the entrepreneurship startup process because they wanted people to stay and they wanted them to start companies and so the first thing they did was kind of stripped down the regulation and requirements so that's another thing to ask you know what can we do to make entry into entrepreneurship a little bit easier and then as you scale maybe you take on more and more of the regulatory responsibilities. I think is a really interesting part as well. Let's see if there's anything else I wanted to touch on. You know this whole issue of gender of course and women in particular when they're you know asking for these resources and supports they do get different reactions I think about like women and venture capitalists. We actually trains women founders to reframe questions in their mind because they're often asked questions in a different way that puts them at a negative or deficit. So like you know venture capitalists want us to learn about your team might ask a male founder tell me about your team and then might ask a woman founder how do I know you can do the technology right like there's just a difference in tone. And so I think there's this broad opportunity to make sure that people get an equitable experience and we're seeing some interesting startups where you know getting loans that are not predatory and are based on more simple criteria can be done online where you don't face kind of some of the power barriers and bias issues. So you know at the end of the day I think that's the big thing is for you to leave people not only with like here's what we've seen here's what we've learned based on this here's where we can go here are the next big opportunities where policy could make a difference or we don't have to have this happen again we can actually plan now for the new companies that are being started during COVID. So yeah I was really impressed and I really enjoyed all both of your presentations and I'm excited to see where you go forward from there. Thank you. Would you like to open up to any audience questions? Does the audience have any questions for our panelists? Sure. I have one. I have two. First one for Allison and the other party. I thought that was actually a really interesting one because I think through like not my personal experience but through people I know that are in a stressful and recommended industry and then when you're out of pandemic that really obviously just throws it off its tracks I can't imagine that. Did they did a lot of them? I know you touched briefly on it but maybe you just expand on like how maybe their mental health in regards to their profession was different before the pandemic versus now. Did you just find that hunger was so much worse? Yeah so I think obviously the party planning industry as a whole is very competitive you know their weddings were canceled, birthday parties canceled all of that and I think the majority of my interviews centered around how it was really challenging kind of navigating how all these you know like events that were happening and it was so competitive how it went from that to basically overnight there was nothing and they didn't really have anything to do for their business for months. I think both of the businesses I talked to they were kind of shut down like indefinitely. And that obviously had an impact on their mental health they started questioning oh well maybe I should go into something else and for the second business I touched on it briefly but originally they were doing like picnic tables and stuff. And it was more of like a gathering kind of sort of event and she had to switch her business model completely to be more floral arrangement so she could just drop it off and whatever you know it wasn't necessarily for an event. So there was a lot of changes they had to adapt to very quickly and I think having to adapt so quickly with very little support had a really big impact on their mental health and they're still trying to address it now. How you know they can move forward and still support themselves as individuals but also support their business and you know their entrepreneurial goals going forward. Yeah I also have a question for both of you guys presentations like this is something I never had even really thought like you think about but you don't really like have the opportunity to delve into it more. And I think you guys just provided like amazing context to the topics that you were researching and I've learned so so so much. But Erin I had a question about these businesses that you were taught there were a couple that you said you used as case studies did they express or were like super aware of like this gender disparity. Because I know certain sometimes people are in they'll be experiencing hardships that they're not aware that there's people that aren't experiencing that do you know what I mean like they're not aware of like this gap. So I'm just really curious if like they were aware of that and if so how did they express it and what did they feel like they needed that the others were getting and they weren't. Right I think that well I don't want to speak on behalf of these business owners but knowing that they are occupying spaces in the business sector that are female dominated cosmetology industries retail that did have to experience incredibly incredibly high rates of closures for months on end and because of that we're not able to retain a lot of their employees throughout all of that. I think they felt sort of a frustration and maybe felt like they were being not targeted but like definitely desperately impacted by the closures maybe even more than say restaurants or like retail that can pivot to online. Those companies were able to sort of continue services and adapt in a way that certain industries simply couldn't at all without like their in person services. And so I think that knowing that you're in a sector that is facing sort of some of the most difficult challenges of the pandemic definitely compounds sort of the mental health challenges that Allison was talking about. Party planning includes that too you know these type of industries could not really adapt in the same way to the pandemic that other industries were able to and I think that like I said the Cal relief grants tried to touch on that but I don't think they definitely did that well enough and I don't think that they were focusing on businesses that couldn't adapt in any sort of way to the pandemic as much as they could have. I think that's an interesting question. What else is different about in person businesses versus those that can be done online going forward. What is what are policies and things that need to be done to support them. Are there other things that go beyond the impacts of covid that we should be thinking about are these sectors do they have different requirements you know if they're in that you know the hair business or in these different businesses should the policies be the same for all businesses or are there legitimate reasons to think about re-crafting different policies for different sectors. There are like different nonprofits and there are different groups and community groups that focus on women entrepreneurs as well as just like women employees and working mothers and I was curious to know if you had any information on what these community groups and nonprofits and what initiatives are enduring during the pandemic to support. I know there was a lot of shortfalls but I was wondering like on the other end what what they were doing during the pandemic to help support these women. I thought a little bit I definitely looked into some like minority owned or women owned business communities that their main goal was sort of educating about loan programs and sort of trying to reduce inequities and those resources knowledge about them and knowledge on how to complete them which I think was really important. As for child care I'm not really sure I didn't come across anything like that because the child care industry itself was forced into closures which just compounds all of this. But yeah those are definitely a great network of support for small women owned businesses. Yeah I think the role of nonprofit organizations and their support they can provide to women in business is something that the businesses I interviewed did not explore. They were mainly looking into kind of government relief programs loan programs stuff like that. And I mentioned this a little bit they had a lot of barriers just you know like bureaucratic barriers they didn't understand applications or they didn't know where to find these programs. And I think one of the reasons for that is because they didn't have access or they didn't know how to access these kinds of organizations because obviously they do exist. Southern California is a very populous area and I'm sure there are a lot of them that were willing to assist these businesses. But you know their their potential wasn't really realized with the two businesses I talked to. And I would honestly be interested in learning more about what organizations are available within the Orange County and Inland Empire and how we can connect small businesses like the ones I interviewed and you know get them the support that they need moving forward.