Seattle Ranks Top 10 in the World for Female Entrepreneurship

If you’re a female entrepreneur, head to Seattle. According to Dell, Seattle is one of the best places in the world for women to start a business. The study, in partnership with the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, analyzed communities around the world to see which cities were best for female entrepreneurs. In total, the U.S. had four cities rank in the top 25 with Seattle coming in at #10.

The ranking was shared at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), which was held at Stanford University. The goal of the ranking was to help Dell measure a city’s ability to attract and support high-potential women entrepreneurs.

“Innovation and job creation by women entrepreneurs is critical for a thriving global economy, yet our research shows some cities and countries are doing far more than others to encourage and support this important subset of the start-up community,” Karen Quintos, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Dell, told USA Today.

Inside the Female Entrepreneur Study

Specifically, the study looked at 50 cities worldwide with active entrepreneurial communities and evaluated five criteria.

1. Access to Capital: The availability and value of funding provided to female entrepreneurs.
2. Markets: The size, transparency, and policies of the markets available to women.
3. Talent: The availability of female talent.
4. Technology: Women’s access to technology, its costs, and the policies associated with it.
5. Culture: How welcoming the culture is toward women-owned businesses.

Each of the five criteria played a significant role in how the cities were ranked. For example, while San Francisco ranked #1 for female talent, it ranked #6 for culture, indicating that the male tech culture did not invite or support female entrepreneurs like it could. Unsurprisingly, support, or lack thereof, had one of the largest impacts on the success of women entrepreneurship. According to the study, female entrepreneurship support was 86% correlated with the city’s ability and likelihood of growing its economy.

The Rankings

 Overall, the top ten best cities for high-growth women entrepreneurs were as follows:

1. New York City
2. San Francisco
3. London
4. Stockholm
5. Singapore
6. Toronto
7. Washington DC
8. Sydney
9. Paris
10. Seattle