Where are you going to locate your new business? For many entrepreneurs, the first office – at least while starting out – is the kitchen table or back room. This is, of course, fair enough given how difficult it can be to find affordable premises while your business is still finding its feet.

But where you decide to base your new business can have significant effects on its growth; studies show that entrepreneurs benefit from setting up near to each other and interacting. However, new research by academics at Rotman School of Management suggests that women in Canada tend to set up their businesses in areas where there are up to 20 per cent fewer other entrepreneurs operating nearby. They also tend to choose areas where there is less economic activity overall.

Sometimes this is because women choose to keep their work close to home (the women studied had commutes an average of 20 per cent shorter than male entrepreneurs) because of family or caring responsibilities. In other cases it’s because they feel excluded from business networks dominated by “old boys’ clubs”, leading to a type of gender segregation of enterprise that in turn leads to lost economic opportunities for the country as a whole, the researchers say.

Tanya Hine, president of the British Association of Women Entrepreneurs (BAWE), says that the situation is quite different in the UK. Here, women locate their businesses where there is most demand for their products or services, despite feeling left out of male business networks. “The majority of our women entrepreneurs are based in big cities such as London, Birmingham and Sheffield,” she says. “But we do feel excluded from the old boys’ club. Obviously they have been at it much longer than we have. They go off together, go to football together and it’s quite difficult for women to break into that.” However, BAWE represents women who run good-sized enterprises with employees, rather than sole traders or those who operate “lifestyle businesses”, where work-life balance is more important than big profits. Incorporate these second two groups and the picture – at least as far as a desire to work close to home – is much more similar to the Canadian model.

Jackie Brierton, the policy director at Prowess, a network of organisations that supports women entrepreneurs, says that in recent years there has been a significant growth in the number of self-employed and entrepreneurial women in rural areas: “The reasons are quite complex but the obvious ones are women choosing to work nearer home because they have caring responsibilities.”

Rather than missing out on networking opportunities as a result of their gender or location, they’re setting up their own contact groups to keep in touch. “I think that women are pretty good at forming their own networks, even though they might look quite different from old boys’ clubs,” Brierton says.

There’s also the question of finance, says Sally Goodsell, the cheif executive of Finance South East, a regional funding organisation. While a lifestyle business brings many benefits and may be exactly what a woman leaving the corporate rat-race is looking for, women who want to build high-growth businesses will need monetary backing. “And that is where the lack of financial networks can hold them back,” Goodsell says. Women entrepreneurs are often very uncomfortable about borrowing money. They don’t want to ask, and when they do they don’t ask for enough, she says. “They tend to be very risk-aware and don’t want it to get out of control.” What’s needed from their finance networks isn’t access to venture capitalists and business angels so much as support to develop their business plans – and confidence in asking for money. “Women do not always prepare their cases as well as they could. They are not always aware of the opportunities.”

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