The World’s Top Cities For Female Entrepreneurs

List based on Dell’s Women Entrepreneur Cities Index

Businesses are booming worldwide and surprisingly many founders are females - but where is the best place for women to start-up a business?
 

 
Whether you’re male or female, setting up a business is always going to be tough at the start. Until recently females have been catching men up when being recognised as successful entrepreneurs.
 
Ecard Shack analysed Dell’s Women Entrepreneur Cities Index and managed to discover the best cities for female entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses in.
 
But which city came out on top? It was New York, New York.
 
Following New York was the UK’s capital city - London - in third place for its markets and the capital it offers to women to start up their business. London also came in an impressive second place for its technology it provides to entrepreneurs.
 
While the usual suspects dominate the top three spots – New York City, the Bay Area, and London, there are some surprising entrants in the top ten, including Boston and Stockholm (at no. 4 and 5 respectively) and Singapore (no. 8), the only city outside of North America and Europe to make it.
 
The top 50 cities have been plotted onto this map here, but the top 10 for each of five pillars (markets, talent, capital, culture and technology) are below:

So, between the money and the culture, New York makes a strong case for entrepreneurs.

As you can see, some cities are better than others at unlocking the potential female entrepreneurs have. There are still lots of room for improvement because men continue to own 1.5 times as many businesses, have 3.5 times as many employees and generate 4.5 times more revenue than women do.
 
With that said, over the past 5 years women have been starting up and growing their businesses in a variety of sectors and women-led firms have increased by 20 percent. A study done in 2016 found that 413,899 women-owned firms were in New York which is nearly double of Los Angeles’.

Despite the UK having changes to its economic structure from Brexit, London saw an array of start-ups in 2017 resulting in the capital still having a heavy influence on the global tech front. One of the start-ups included an app - Rubric -  that helps Instagram users come up with witty and relevant captions for their photographs. It was set up by a young female entrepreneur and was named as one of Business Insider’s 29 coolest UK female startups of 2017.
 
Businesses worldwide should be asking themselves how they can support women in creating their own businesses. Easy steps of doing this is by promoting courses related to STEM, helping them connect with other successful entrepreneurs and giving them funding to attend courses.
 
So, which country will be recognised for its potential to support female entrepreneurs next? Maybe the likes of Cape Town, Johannesburg or New Delhi...

You can view the full interactive graphic here which shows the current 50 cities that foster the growth of women-led businesses.