Findings from a new study into where the best city to be a female entrepreneur is appears to show it’s ‘sweet home, Chicago’ with the city just beating nearby Boston to the title.
The findings of the report, which was compiled by Compass, a software company, and entitled the 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking, show that overall it has been a relatively good year for female entrepreneurs, with a marked increase on the previous year.
Breaking it down to cities and looking at the number of female-founded companies across the world, the report shows that, while known as the Windy City, Chicago is not blowing hot air when it comes to encouraging more women founders.
Compiled into a chart by Statista, of the US city’s portfolio of start-ups founded in 2015, 30pc were led by women, followed closely by Boston on 29pc.
Somewhat incorrectly, it has to be said, the region of Silicon Valley (in San Francisco), is counted as a city and saw 24pc of its companies founded by women, more than Los Angeles and Montreal, which both saw 22pc.
The highest-ranked European city in the report is Paris, which saw 21pc of its start-ups led by women, while the highest-ranked Asian cities were the city-state of Singapore at 19pc, joined by the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
According to the report, the number of women entrepreneurs entering the field has risen by an impressive 80pc over the past three years.
However, this hides the reality for female entrepreneurs today, who still are massively underrepresented across the board, with just 18pc of total start-ups across the world having a woman as their founder.
There remains a silver lining, however, as this marks an increase of 8pc on the same figure just five years ago.
Bar chart provided by Statista
Women Invent is Silicon Republic’s campaign to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. It has been running since March 2013, and is kindly supported by Intel, Eircom, Fidelity Investments, ESB, Accenture and CoderDojo.
Chicago skyline image via Shutterstock
