Features

WASHINGTON — Companies owned by women are receiving just 2.5 percent of the government’s nearly $200 billion a year in contracts, and Congress says that’s not nearly enough. In fact, lawmakers declared five years ago the percentage must be doubled. 

It hasn’t happened. 

By all accounts, the government-wide numbers won’t change much until there is a sizable increase at the Defense Department, which controls the lion’s share of federal contracting. 

And at the Pentagon, a decade of military downsizing has slashed the pool of specialists who match businesses with contracts. 

That matters because small companies can get lost in the labyrinthine world of federal contracts. By helping a company navigate what’s available and what’s required to get it, these specialists can cut years off the process. 

“To get business, you have to get certified, but you can’t get certified until you actually have business,” said Lydia Schmitt, a plastics engineer who formed her own company, LPS Injection Molding, about six months ago in Girard, Kan. 

Schmitt wants to become a subcontractor for a corporation that does business with the Defense Department, such as Boeing Co., Raytheon Aircraft Co. or any of the other aerospace companies in Wichita, Kan. 

Preliminary steps, such as certifying that a potential contractor does good work, can become huge hurdles. 

Patricia Pliego Stout says she spent six years seeking Pentagon business for her San Antonio-based travel service company. 

Finally, in mid-March, Stout learned she had been awarded the travel services for Oklahoma City’s Tinker Air Force Base. The work will boost her staff at The Alamo Travel Group from 20 to 27 employees. 

A government contract “builds up your image as a contractor; it gives you security,” said Stout, a board member of the National Women’s Business Council and a leader of the National Association of Women Business Owners. 

Women own an estimated 38 percent of all businesses in the United States, but they received 2.5 percent of the $189 billion in federal contracts awarded in fiscal 1999, the most recent year for which data are available. 

According to a recent study by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, federal contracting with firms headed by women has grown in some agencies, notably the departments of Veterans Affairs, State and NASA. 

The government will never meet its 5 percent target unless the goal is met by the Defense Department, which in fiscal 1999 achieved only about 2.5 percent. 

Robert Neal, the Pentagon’s director for small and disadvantaged business utilization, acknowledged that adding acquisition specialists might help. He said it’s tough to make the case for hiring them. 

“Folks are looking at new planes, or improvements in our technology to deliver weapons of mass destruction,” said Neal, who oversees about 500 such specialists. “When I look at and request increases for personnel, and they look at that relative to mo dernizing our weapons systems, I don’t fare very well in the discussion.” 

Congress may need to restore a requirement that the Pentagon employ a set number of small business specialists, said Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee. The rule was eliminated with 1994 legislation intended to streamline contracting. 

“It simply isn’t enough to set a goal and hope agencies attain it,” Bond said. 

Lawmakers did take a step toward boosting the number of women contractors last year by adding women-owned businesses to a government “mentor-protege” program that matches major contractors with smaller companies, Neal said. 

“We think that’s going to help substantially,” he said, explaining that larger businesses can show a small firm ways to make its prices more competitive with other contractors. “It gives us the opportunity to take, for lack of a better term, a diamond in the rough and really polish it up.” 

——— 

On the Net: 

Pentagon’s small business contracting site: http://www.sadbu.com 

Small Business Administration, Office of Women’s Business Ownership: 

http://www.sba.gov/womeninbusiness/ 

Kansas Womens Business Center: http://www.kansaswbc.com 

General Accounting Office: http://www.gao.gov