Over the last year or so many people have asked where women tech entrepreneurs are. Too often I've heard that there was a lack of us, but there has never been any solid data stating how many tech startups are founded by women. People have made guesses based on the number of companies started by women and the total number of tech companies that are started, but, in researching this, I have not found one business organization that works with startups who's been able to tell me exactly how many tech companies are (co-)founded by women. So a year ago, I decided to change that.
I started to keep track of female (co-)founded tech companies that were profiled by various news outlets. I wanted to know who was out there, what kind of company they were building, how many were getting founded, how many were sold, etc. I put together an excel spreadsheet and kept tabs on these companies. To date, I've identified 538. Yep, you read that right. 538. Sure, it may not seem like a lot to you at first glance, but remember, these are the ones that we are aware of. There could easily be 2 maybe 3 or even 10 times more out there then this. Only time will tell. What's good about this is now we have a benchmark to gauge how women are progressing. So how does Chicago look? Take a look. And if you want to see how Chicago compares to the rest of the nation, go to http://ow.ly/7q4yq
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and here's a breakdown by Category
