PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island ranked No. 34 in the nation and second in New England in a report on the best states for women entrepreneurs conducted by FitSmallBusiness.com.
The report measured and compared several metrics including the:
- Percentage of women-owned firms out of total businesses in a state
- Percentage of a state’s business revenue coming from women-owned firms
- Women economic clout in each state
- Trend in net number of women-owned firms per day
- Percentage of women-owned firms with paid employees
- Percentage of employees in the state that are working in women-owned firms
Rhode Island ranked No. 34 or worse in four of the categories.
- The Ocean State ranked No. 38 for percentage of women-owned firms with paid employees at 16.5 percent.
- Rhode Island’s percentage of employees that work at women-owned businesses was No. 36 at 6.82 percent.
- Rhode Island also ranked No. 34 for lowest percentage of women-owned firms in the nation at 32.21 percent. Georgia ranked No. 1 in the nation with 40.49 percent.
The state ranked No. 42 for the trend in net number of new women-owned owned firms per day at two. However, the size of the state isn’t taken into account in this metric. For instance, California on average created 129 women-owned firms per day, while smaller states like Hawaii and Vermont created three and one, respectively.
However, Rhode Island’s women-owned firms ranked No. 19 in the nation for the percent of total revenue in the state that women-owned firms constituted, 4.47 percent. The state also was ranked No. 19 for “economic clout,” which measured the growth of female-owned businesses from 2007-2016, including the number of firms, revenue and employment growth.
In addition to having the largest percentage of firms being women owned, Georgia took the top ranking in the nation.
New England:
Four of the six New England states were ranked among the worst five states in the nation for women-owned businesses. Only Maine was ranked among the top 25 in the nation at No. 22.
Massachusetts ranked No. 46 in the nation, followed by New Hampshire (No. 47), Connecticut (No. 48), and Vermont (No. 49.) Nebraska ranked as the worst in the nation.
Massachusetts ranked in the bottom three in the nation for its percentage of employees at women-owned firms (5.86 percent) as well as for its economic clout metric (No. 48).
Chris Bergenheim is the PBN web editor.
