A new report ranks nations not just on the general economic climate for business formation, but also the special hurdles that can hold back women entrepreneurs in particular.
Women who want to start and grow businesses need many of the same things their male counterparts do, things like streamlined bureaucracy, a helpful and easily navigable legal system and access to capital. But around the world women entrepreneurs also face unique obstacles, both formal or informal.
If the society that surrounds you has certain ideas of what careers are appropriate for women, and business owner isn’t among them, some strong women will be able to overcome that obstacle, but others will curb their ambitions. If the laws for women are different than for men, female founders will clearly face additional hurdles and some will fail to clear them.
So which countries offer women both the correct business conditions that all entrepreneurs require and lack the social, legal and economic barriers that make things especially hard for women? The Gender-Global Entrepreneurial Development Index, a new study commissioned by Dell and released at the Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network conference on Monday, delves into the details of the question, examining 30 countries to see which offer the best environment for ambitious female business owners.
Here are the countries that topped the rankings, along with their scores on a hundred-point scale:
USA (83)
Australia (80)
Sweden (73)
France (67)
Germany (67)
Chile (55)
United Kingdom (54)
Poland (51)
Spain (49)
Mexico (43)
And which countries were found to be in need of significant improvements to encourage their high-potential female entrepreneurs? The bottom of the list reads like this:
Malaysia (32)
Jamaica (30)
Nigeria (29)
Morocco (27)
Ghana (27)
India (26)
Uganda (19)
Egypt (19)
Bangladesh (17)
Pakistan (11)
While the very top of the list contains highly developed countries and few shocks (the US and Australia topped the same ranking last year as well), the report overall reveals several interesting and surprising facts about which countries are falling short and where. All countries studied had significant room for improvement, and while richer nations generally fared better in the rankings, economic development alone was far from the only determining factor (see the cases of Mexico and Japan, which ranked 14th, for example).
For some nations, a lack of business ideas may be holding women back. In the US and European, less than a third of women say they have identified a business opportunity. In emerging markets, there are tons of business ideas -- 69% of African women have had one -- but other hurdles around education and capital hold back female-founded businesses.
Even the most basic building blocks of female entrepreneurship are missing in several of the nations studied. In 14 of the countries, for example, more than half of women do not even have a bank account. In yet others, a primary issue is the lack of female managers, which shrinks the pool of experienced female business talent. In the Japan, for example, just nine percent of managers are female.
Here in the US, access to basic banking may not be much a problem, but the report notes that some industries -- notably technology -- remain male dominated, which discourages women from entering these sectors.
“The Gender-GEDI results demonstrate that basic improvements are required in terms of access to equal legal rights and education as well as acceptance of women’s social and economic empowerment,” commented Ruta Aidis, project director for the Gender-GEDI.
Image credits: World Bank Photo Collection and United Nations Development Programme via Flickr.
