When Jacqueline Richards was “glass ceilinged” at Delta Hotels, she went looking for other options. She worked for four years to open the Holiday Inn Select Hotel & Suites in Kanata, and then decided to set out on her own. The fourth-generation single mother had previous work experience creating mortgage strategies for clients and decided to run with it – straight to the bank.

As a woman, Richards’ path to self-employment wasn’t always easy. In fact, when she went to take out her own mortgage the man helping her asked when her husband would be arriving to the meeting, and if not him, her father.

She is not alone. Statistics Canada National Household Survey data published 11 years after Richards stepped out of the hotel industry to start her own business shows that there were over 1.5 times more male self-employed workers than female self-employed workers in Ottawa.

Source: 2011 National Household Survey

In a phone interview, Richards was not surprised by the asymmetry of the most recent data. She said women face more challenges than men when it comes to starting their own businesses. Multi-tasking is just one of them.

“We have to do everything. We’ve always been told we have to do it all,” she said, rattling off a laundry list of traditional housewife duties like childcare and cleaning. “As a single mom, that’s what I had to do.”

Gender stereotypes also manifest outside of the home, in the workplace. As Richards recalls, two female friends of hers started new jobs at the same time that she originally entered the hotel industry. Her friends are single mothers as well – “the three musketeers,” she said. One went into the travel industry and the other became a car mechanic.

“As a car mechanic, she was treated exactly like, ‘What would you know? You’re a woman. What are you doing here?’” said Richards, adding that as a result the friend left to become a school teacher. “When I was glass ceilinged I went out on my own, because I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t move where I wanted to go.”

“When I was glass ceilinged I went out on my own, because I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t move where I wanted to go.” – Jacqueline Richards

Today, she is a self-described and evident leader who has been successfully self-employed as a mortgage professional for more than 10 years, with her own sing-song slogan: “If you’re looking for strategies for your mortgage money you need to call the mortgage honey.” She has sat as the chair of the Eastern Ottawa Chamber of Commerce, on the board of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce and is currently the director of programs for the Womens Network of Ottawa, among other positions.

“(The Womens Network of Ottawa) was started with women who were in the government who had ideas about moving up the ranks, and they were glass ceilinged. And so now what do you do? Maybe I should open up my own company. Maybe I should team up with other women who are having the same issue. Maybe, collectively we are powerful,” she said. “We need more women on boards…we need more women who will stand up and do it.”

She has also become the self-titled “Wealthy Yogini,” combining her love of the money business with her love of practicing and teaching hatha yoga. In 2006, she published Yoga for Your Personal Finances: (Practical & Spiritual Solutions for Financial Health, Volume 1). The book draws connections between money, energy and yoga that may at first seem unintuitive. Seven chapters deal with seven money issues, such as home ownership and budgeting, and two hatha poses are included with each story.

The book, which emphasizes the importance of taking a breath when managing finances, “presented many opportunities,” she said. She has become a public speaker, hosts vision board workshops, and will be leading several upcoming retreats, including a 7-day retreat in Antigua, a 27-hour yoga and pottery journey in June, and her Non-Disclosures Master Minds group will make the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in May.

“How can Jacqueline Richards do all of that?” she asked rhetorically, with the self-referential trademark of a motivational speaker. “Run a chamber, have a daughter, run her property and teach? You call in the truth. Ask for help.”

Asked if there is room for improvement in the amount and accessibility of help available to female self-employed workers, Richards responded “very much so.” While City of Ottawa communications coordinator Celine Singhroy referred JOUR 4101 to services such as Invest Ottawa and the Ottawa Public Library business services section, Richards said “not many people know about Invest Ottawa.”

“If they could, it would be great if they knocked on doors,” she said, adding that city representatives could attend women in business Meetup groups, and even consider a Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada-style organization for women in business.

In the meantime, she has some help of her own to offer in the form of advice. “Just do one thing, one thing only,” she said. “I think women in business find that difficult to do, because we’re tasked with so much, so time management is huge for us. We think we have to do everything ourselves. As a female entrepreneur, I didn’t ask anyone to come and work with me. I didn’t ask for an assistant – I should have. And I finally did – I had an assistant for a year who was fantastic, but I had to have the courage to say, ‘I can’t do it all.’

“Be courageous.”