Female Entrepreneurs: A Growing Trend?

Longtime entreVIEW readers — and I mean really long time readers — already know that, despite spending most of my days working with entrepreneurs, I'm a big fan of "Shark Tank".

I was recently watching an episode (which, admittedly, may not have been the most recent episode as I keep a stash of them on my DVR) with my oldest daughter. We both noticed that, for the first time, a majority of the sharks (three of five) were female. This is a long way from when the show premiered in 2009 and only one of the five sharks, Barbara Corcoran, was female. Since then, Lori Greiner (Queen of QVC) has become a regular and, more recently, Sara Blakely (founder of Spanx) and Bethenny Frankel have become frequent guest sharks.

Maybe the entrepreneurial world is finally closing the gender gap? I came across this article containing facts that may support this proposition. The article indicates that, while only one in four companies in the U.S. are run by women, the number of female-owned firms is growing twice as fast as all business. There’s also a lot of interesting analysis about other significant differences between the sexes in how and why women start and run enterprises.
As the father of two daughters (and a lawyer for many female entrepreneurs), I couldn’t be more excited to see that the business community has been embracing female entrepreneurship. I also found a little added inspiration in a list of the 15 most famous female entrepeneurs (who, by the way, have personal net worths ranging from only $11.5 million to $11.7 billion). 

That said, I’m not naïve enough to think, even in a post #MeToo movement world, that all of the glass ceilings have been shattered along with other challenges women face as potential entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, I’m hopeful that it is indeed a trend, that it will continue moving in the same positive direction, and that aspiring female entrepreneurs (maybe even including my daughters) will in the future have access to support and resources they need to be successful in their endeavors.