In a new report for the Kauffman Foundation, Lesa Mitchell makes the case that encouraging more women entrepreneurs is essential in encouraging economic growth for the US.  Mitchell, vice president for Kauffman's initiatives focused on advancing innovation, wants us to look beyond the notion that increasing business opportunities for women is important just for women.  This graphic sums up her findings:

Job creation is of utmost importance, and new businesses bring new jobs.  More than half of college graduates are female, and yet male college graduates are significantly more likely to start their own companies. More women are getting into the startup game, but not at a fast enough rate to close the gap.  In the ten years prior to the great recession, women-owned firms grew at a relatively tiny rate of 7.6%.  But, according to the Mitchell, that's not the most alarming figure:

When we look at growth measures by revenue, the gap begins to widen. In the latest Kauffman Firm Survey, which tracked new firms three years out from their startup dates, 19.8 percent of the women’s firms reported annual revenues more than $100,000 versus nearly 33 percent of the men’s firms. The average revenue of men’s firms was almost twice that of women’s, nearly $120,000 versus about $60,000.

In this range, we are still dealing with extremely small startups. Many are made up of the owner plus a helper or two, and a sizable number appear to be part-time side businesses: About 17 percent of the entrepreneurs in the KFS (of both genders combined) reported working on their businesses less than twenty hours per week.
Not all firms that are small in their third year are destined to remain small, however. There may be some with growth potential that are taking a while to develop scalable products and business models and to achieve consistent earnings. This may be especially likely to happen with innovative startups, since the innovation process is highly iterative: new software spends time in development and beta testing; a new physical product may evolve through a series of prototypes. Also, it is not uncommon for innovator/entrepreneurs to work on their early-stage ideas ―on the side‖ while holding full-time jobs. So the question is: Are women starting a proportionate share of these types of firms, some of which will go on to have high economic impact?

The available evidence suggests that they are not. Every five years, the Census Bureau conducts its nationwide Survey of Business Owners. The SBO samples privately held, nonfarm businesses of all ages, from recently founded to many years in existence. Using SBO data, the American Express OPEN report for 2011 found that just 1.8 percent of women-owned firms had revenues more than $1 million. The figure for men-owned firms was 6.3 percent.

Read Overcoming the Gender Gap: Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers here.