Women-owned businesses have been sprouting up across the country at a rapid pace. According to The Huffington Post, a recent survey conducted by American Express OPEN found the number of businesses in the U.S. has jumped 34 percent in the past 15 years, but the number of those owned by women has increased by 50 percent - there currently is 8.3 million women owning their own company.
Much of the attention of women-owned businesses is drawn to both Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, but there are plenty of other states in which female-owned companies are thriving. In fact, when it comes to the states with the sharpest increase in women-owned businesses, it is the more rural areas that have done the best, according to the news source.
"If you live in a rural area and you lose your job, it's a lot harder to find another one than if you live in a more urban area," small business adviser to American Express OPEN Alice Bredin told the news source. "So necessity has become the mother of innovation for a lot of these rural female founders."
The best state for women to start their own company in the past 15 years goes to Georgia, which saw a growth of 97.5 percent. Nevada took second with an 87.6 percent boost. Mississippi, Florida and North Carolina rounded out the top five with 76.7 percent, 73.3 percent and 68.8 percent, respectively, according to the media outlet.
The remainder of the top 10 were Texas and Alabama, which took the sixth and seventh spot, followed by South Carolina, Maryland and New York. Arizona, Virginia, Wyoming, Utah and Hawaii also made the top 15 list, respectively, the news outlet reports.
Even though women have succeeded in many facets of the business world, including outpacing men in earnings growth in the past 10 years, they are still not making headway in one area. According to the Los Angeles Times, men have garnered 80 percent of the 2.6 million net jobs created since the recession ended in June 2009. The main reason behind this is that male-dominated manufacturing jobs, which dealt with extreme lay offs, have improved dramatically, but female-dominated jobs have not.