The auto-didact, Julianne Bien, is president of a company that designs coloured lights used in alternative healing. She was a nominee but not a winner at an evening designed to celebrate five female entrepreneurs at different stages of their careers, from start-up through sustainment and on to lifetime achievement.

Strenuous self-promotion is what entrepreneurs must do. But the rest of us need to do it, too, in this new career world in which we have all become self-starters regardless of whether we are making our way up in a corporation or striking out on our own.

In that sense, ambitious women are slightly ahead of the game: they've always needed an entrepreneurial streak if they wanted to succeed, even if employed by someone else.

Which isn't to say every one of us is out there creating a business or taking big-money risks. But the line between entrepreneurs and the rest of us is definitely more blurred.

This particular dinner celebrating women came equipped with its own widely circulated Royal Bank of Canada survey showing that female entrepreneurs, unlike their male counterparts, are primarily motivated not by a desire to become wealthy but by personal priorities, such as a flexible schedule, family commitments or just a desire to do something they love.

The survey also included numbers worth dwelling on: Since 1981, the number of female entrepreneurs has increased by more than 200 per cent, and they contribute about $18-billion to the Canadian economy.

Of course, numbers don't convey the ironies behind them -- that many women started businesses because they encountered barriers in the corporate world, or that many women are finding it easier than men to get bank loans for their businesses, but only up to a certain amount.

At the dinner, I expected more than a few whispers about how "tough" it was out there, how "tired" women were of trying to do it all and, above all, how abysmal the numbers still are for women who want to reach the top.

But the women I sat with, who were at different stages in their personal and professional lives, were buoyant and funny. Maybe they were taking a night off from their cares and woes. Maybe they had other priorities, other dreams.

RBC senior accounts manager Zanita DiSalle, for instance, had taken six years off when her children were infants and wrote two children's books, one of which will be published next year. That accomplishment was a huge thrill, but so is commercial banking -- "doing everything I possibly can to help entrepreneurs succeed," she says.

"The women I sat with talked about politics, they talked about money -- including what one of them wistfully described as "rock star salaries," which seem to be now in the $150,000-to-$200,000 range, not quite yet what any of them was making.

The winners included Sharon McNamara, who with her husband had started a glass-blowing business in Nova Scotia, and Andrea Feunekes, who, also with her husband, had created Remsoft Inc., a New Brunswick-based software maker for the forestry industry (Premier Bernard Lord showed up to congratulate her).

There was Sherri Stevens, who had started a chain of successful Ontario temp agencies (and who thanked her mother, "my first employee"). And Lynda Powless, who won a "trailblazer" award for starting Turtle Island News, the only national aboriginal newspaper. Ms. Powless, who endured ugly native politics in the process -- her office was shot at, and she was arrested twice when she tried to oppose the band council -- gave emotional thanks to her barely grown sons for standing by her.

If the crowd had a personal favourite, though, it was lifetime achiever Wendy McDonald, past president and now chair of BC Bearings Engineers Ltd., whose annual profit did not elicit as many gasps of admiration as the fact that she had survived three husbands and, as she said, "raised 10 children -- eight of them teenagers at the same time." One son is now president of her company.

Nobody talked at length about the challenges of entrepreneurialism -- the lonely nights of balancing books, the long days of searching for clients, the self-doubts about whether there is even a place in the world for their products.

Nor was there mention of the fact that entrepreneurs often get punished when their businesses don't succeed and they try to return to the corporate fold: some unimaginative employers choose to see only a gap on their résumés instead of a few years of knuckle-biting bravery and some lessons well-learned.

The broader lesson to take away from this glitzy "you go, girl" evening was that we need to understand and reward entrepreneurialism, not just because of its contributions to the economy but because the world has changed so much that we are all there now, forced to be career entrepreneurs whether we like it or not.

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