Are you ready to take the entrepreneurial plunge? If so, a recent report compiled by CrunchBase, a leading media authority in profiling startups, revealed certain schools are better at developing aspiring female entrepreneurs. With 9.1 million women-owned businesses and women launching an estimated 1,200 new businesses a day in 2014, according to a report by American Express OPEN, as a would-be entrepreneur you’ll join the increasing number of trailblazers turning their entrepreneurial dreams into reality.
[Related: NYC Program to Reach 5,000 Underserved Women Entrepreneurs]
In 2014, CrunchBase reported that the percentage of
female founders among VC-funded companies nearly doubled between 2009 and 2014. In a follow-up report, CrunchBase analyzed the educational background of 3,616 female founders in its database to determine which universities are most strongly represented among women founders. Although the report doesn’t identify the types of degrees female founders earned, it does provide a snapshot of the schools that have produced the most female entrepreneurs. Here is a glimpse of the list of colleges:- Stanford University — 236 female founders
- Harvard University —Â 235 female founders
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 127 female founders
- University of California, Berkeley — 105 female founders
- Columbia University —Â 105 female founders
- University of Pennsylvania —Â 103 female founders
- New York University — 91 female founders
- Yale University —Â 64 female founders
- Cornell University — 64 female founders
- The University of California, Los Angeles — 62 female founders
CrunchBase also compiled a few other highlights:
- The top five schools account for only about 15% of female founders. There is a long list of universities producing notable numbers of female founders.
- Three British institutions, Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the London School of Economics, made the top 25 – despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of the companies in our study are U.S. based.
- On a regional basis, the northeast and western regions of the U.S. have the most schools on the list (11 and 6, respectively) and the largest number of graduates who went on to become female founders (913 and 518, respectively).