How well is Orlando ranking for business-minded women? Compared to the rest of the country, it seems that this community is sitting right in the middle.
For businesses owned by women, Orlando ranked at No. 50 out of 100 spots, according to a new survey by WalletHub. As the Orlando Sentinel reported, all major metro areas in Florida rank around the median.
Although this might not be great news, it’s important to note that women in any state and any city face significant challenges when starting up a business.
Reports from the National Women’s Business Council show that there were 9.9 million businesses in the U.S. owned by women in 2012, which was a 27.5% increase from 7.8 million businesses in 2007.
The majority of these businesses are proprietorships, where women own the business but do not employ anyone else. Women-owned employer firms, unfortunately, account for just 10.6% of all employer firms, but they manage to provide 8.9 million jobs and have increased employment rates by 19.5% over the span of five years.
Women are becoming a force to be reckoned with in the corporate world; growth has been steady, but it’s also been slow. It’s getting easier and more affordable for entrepreneurs to branch out and create small businesses, and this is helping women quite a bit.
The rise of social media platforms, for example, have been a huge boon to small businesses that thrive on direct conversation with customers and can’t spend thousands of dollars every month for ads. (And is it any surprise that woman naturally seem to be social media aficionados?) For tasks like record keeping and financial management, cloud services are affordable and flexible enough to accommodate a growing business. In fact, around four out of five small business owners say that they’ve already moved to the cloud.
It should be noted, too, that the move into a digital environment presents women with a unique benefit: when your work is created and presented solely through digital screens, it doesn’t really matter if you’re wearing heels and a skirt because no one can see them anyway.
Orlando clearly has many steps to take before becoming a friendly environment for women to own businesses, but its strong start-up culture and its ability to embrace diversity is unique. If any city can rise to the challenge, certainly it will be this one.
