Thirty years ago Congress passed HR 5050, the Women’s Business Ownership Act. Prior to that legislation, it was almost unheard of for a woman entrepreneur to be able to negotiate a bank loan to start her own business. While there were no specific laws prohibiting business loans to women in the United States, most bankers, all of them male, were of the opinion that women were not a good investment risk when it came to new enterprises. Men took the risks, and reaped the rewards, while women stayed quietly home to care for family.

HR 5050 changed all that. New York Congressman John LaFalce was instrumental in getting the act written and moved into law. The law made it legal for women to take out business loans from any lending institution in their own name -- not that of their husband or some other male relative. Incredibly, until 1988 women in the United States were barred from taking out any kind of a business loan in their own name; it had to be co-signed by a man. So for people like me who have unique names like Annika Bansal, this posed a big problem.

Since HR 5050 went into effect, women entrepreneurs have been able to multiply and flourish in the United States. While gender-specific statistics are hard to come by, most experts agree that in the past 30 years women CEOs of startups have increased by at least 150 percent, if not more.