What Does A Female Entrepreneur Look Like? (Blog Post)

From edegan.com
Jump to navigation Jump to search


McNair Project
What Does A Female Entrepreneur Look Like? (Blog Post)
Project logo 02.png
Project Information
Project Title
Start Date
Deadline
Primary Billing
Notes
Has project status
Copyright © 2016 edegan.com. All Rights Reserved.


Abstract

A survey-based blog post detailing the trends and tribulations of women in entrepreneurship today.


Blog Post

When powerful businesswomen like Tory Burch boldly state that female entrepreneurs are "crucial to economic growth around the world" in sources like The Economist, people tend to listen. The rise of women in entrepreneurship has been lauded as an "economic tailwind that will give a boost to twenty-first-century growth" by the Kauffman Foudnation and has largely been supported as a major potential boost to the United States' and global economies. With all of this excitement surrounding the role of women in entrepreneurship, what do women who were founding CEOs, presidents, chief technology officers, or leading technologists of tech startups founded between 2002 and 2012 look like?
In a survey of 350 individuals fitting the above description conducted by the Kauffman Foundation and Stanford University, some interesting results were uncovered. For starters, women entrepreneurs are highly educated with 56% having graduate degrees, and 38% percent having bachelor’s degrees. Compared with 33% of the total female population possessing a bachelor’s degree and only 12% possessing a graduate degree, female entrepreneurs represent a highly educated slice.
They've also had an early start, with 40% of female entrepreneurs reporting that they started their first company before the age of 30, and 73% reporting having started their first company by age 40. Their training centers around business, the liberal arts and computer science/IT/engineering, with 27%, 20%, and 18% of respondents reporting that their field of study was in one of those areas respectively. 86% of female entrepreneurs wanted to "capitalize on a business idea they had," 72% had "always wanted to own their own company," and 68% wanted to "build wealth." With impressive educational backgrounds, early-onset determinism, and powerful motivations for founding it is no surprise that female entrepreneurs rank among some of the most powerful business people on the planet. The question remains however, why is their such a disparity between the trends of women in entrepreneurship as opposed to the trends in entrepreneurship as a whole?

References