Philadelphia Region Among Worst for Women-Owned Businesses

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Bad news for Philadelphia’s reputation as an inclusive, cutting edge, growing business ecosystem — the Philadelphia region was ranked 90th out of 100 cities for women-owned businesses by WalletHub.

It’s important to note that WalletHub combined Philadelphia, Camden and Wilmington together for this ranking, so who knows if Philly would have fared better or worse by itself.

WalletHub found that the Philly region got a total score of 40.84 in business friendliness to women — compared to 70.04 for the No. 1 region Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin in Tennessee.

In the category of “female entrepreneurship,” the region ranked 49th. That’s a measure of the percentage of women-owned businesses, their growth, employees, revenues, industry variety, and existence of small business administration centers for women.

It also ranked “business climate for women,” finding that the Philly region ranked a paltry 80th. That category took into account WalletHub’s Working Moms and Gender Inequality rankings.

In “overall new-business friendliness,” the Philly region ranked 64th. That ranking is based on data from WalletHub’s “Start a Business” study.

It’s a tough ranking to digest, considering that Philly has so many successful female entrepreneurs like Yasmine Mustafa or ROAR for Good and Lucinda Duncalfe of Monetate. Just this morning news broke that two 20-somethings that created a natural deodorant company hit $1.3 million in sales since appearing on Shark Tank two months ago. So it’s hard to believe that Philly doesn’t have its share of impressive women-owned businesses.

Nationally, WalletHub said that more than 9.4 million women-owned businesses currently operate in the U.S., according to an American Express OPEN-commissioned report.

“Combined, those firms account for nearly a third of all privately held companies, pull in annual revenues to the tune of $1.5 trillion and provide jobs to roughly eight million workers. What’s more, they’re among the fastest-growing enterprises in the nation — increasing at a rate 1.5 times the U.S. average and topping “the growth rates of all but the largest, publicly-traded firms” in the past 18 years,” said WalletHub.

Top five regions:

1. Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN

2. Chattanooga, TN-GA

3. Columbus, OH

4. Memphis, TN-MS-AR

5. Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI

Bottom five regions:

100. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA

99. Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA

98. Greenville-Anderson-Mauldin, SC

97. Columbia, SC

96. Pittsburgh, PA

95. North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL

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