Are Women’s Gains in Business School Being Reflected in the Entrepreneurial Economy?

A recent survey by the Forte Foundation found that women make up 36 percent of the students at the nation’s leading business schools. At the nation’s top business schools, women are about one of every four faculty members. These numbers have been improving in recent years, albeit at a slow pace.

New data from the U.S. Department of the Census shows that gains by women in business schools have not yet translated to gains in the U.S. economic sector. The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs finds that women owned 1.1 million businesses with paid employees. These made up 19.4 percent of all firms with paid employees. The women-owned firms had total sales of $1.3 trillion in 2014. But this was a mere 4 percent of the sales of all firms with paid employees. Only 1.9 percent of all women-owned firms had been in business for 16 or more years.

About one quarter of all women-owned firms were headed by women from an ethnic minority group. About half of these were owned by Asian-American women.

Women owned 28 percent of all firms with paid employees in the health care/social assistance sector.