On March 3, Gina M. Raimondo was sworn in as the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce by Vice President Kamala Harris. And, since then, she has hit the ground running by hosting a series of town hall meetings with Commerce Department employees in locations around the world throughout the month of March. In her role as Secretary of Commerce, Raimondo will lead ten key agencies focused on promoting jobs...

Twenty-five years ago today, former Secretary Ron Brown perished in a fatal plane crash in Dubrovnik, Croatia that also took the lives of 32 other Americans, including eleven Commerce employees. Brown was leading a delegation of business executives to the former Yugoslavia to explore business opportunities that might help rebuild the war-torn region and sought to make a meaningful difference in...

The Commerce Department’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) hosted the final installment of the 2021 Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium (WES) today and heard from a diverse panel of successful women innovators who shared their stories of entrepreneurship and the challenges they faced along the way. WES, an annual event launched in 2011, has proven to be one of the USPTO’s most popular...

Guest blog post by Ashley Zuelke, Program Manager, Denver Regional Office, U.S. Economic Development Administration I serve as a Program Manager in the Denver Regional Office at the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). I joined EDA in August 2020 to support economic response to and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. My team and I work with applicants throughout our...

Guest blog post by Tanika Hawkins, Acting Director of Administration, Office of the Secretary I have served for 25 years at the U.S. Department of Commerce. I am the Acting Director of Administration with the Commerce Department’s Chief of Staff and oversee, coordinate, and perform all administrative functions and essential tasks for the Office of the Secretary. Each day, I directly support the...

The following is a cross-post from the U.S. Census Bureau Women-owned firms made up only 19.9% of all firms that employed people in the United States in 2018 but their numbers are growing. There were 6,861 more women-owned firms in 2018 than in 2017, up 0.6% to 1.1 million, according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey (ABS). Women-owned employer firms reported nearly $1.8 trillion in...

Guest blog post by Rebecca Dorch, Senior Spectrum Policy Analyst, Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) I am the Senior Spectrum Policy Analyst at the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), Institute for Telecommunication Sciences located in Boulder, Colorado. I have had...

The following blog is from the Commerce Department’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Women continue to explore new opportunities and make inroads into industries once almost exclusively male, such as manufacturing. The evidence shows that attitudes both in the industry and among women are changing. The industry is seeing the inherent value of an integrated and inclusive...