Julie Weeks

Director

Womenable
Empire, Mich.

Julie Weeks is President and CEO of Womenable, a research, program and policy development consultancy enabling women’s entrepreneurship worldwide. Ms. Weeks is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of women’s entrepreneurship, with experience in private and public sectors in the areas of research, public policy and program management. 

Ms. Weeks has more than two decades of experience in research, public policy and communications with proven ability to translate data and complex information into clear, concise, and actionable knowledge. For three years, she served as Executive Director of the National Women’s Business Council, a federally-funded bipartisan policy advisory body created by the U.S. Congress to serve as an independent voice of women’s entrepreneurship and an advisor to the President, U.S. Congress and the U.S. Small Business Administration on women’s entrepreneurship issues.

Prior to that, Ms. Weeks spent nine years as the Director of Research and Managing Director of the Center for Women’s Business Research, a nonprofit organization that conducts research among women business owners and their enterprises. She has also served as Deputy Chief Counsel for Statistics and Research at the U.S. Small Business Administration, and Vice President for Research and Public Policy at two market research firms.

Ms.Weeks has been personally responsible for much of the extant information available on the state of women business owners and their enterprises in the United States. She also has led, coordinated or consulted international research on women business owners and their enterprises in more than a dozen countries, and presented findings of a five-country study on women business owners in the Middle East and North Africa in 2007 and addressed women’s enterprises at a 2005 World Bank conference.

Ms. Weeks serves as the Vice President for the Women’s Entrepreneurship Committee of the International Council for Small Business, co-chairs the Public Policy Council of the Association of Women’s Business Centers, and is on the National Advisory Board of Enterprising Women Magazine.