Utah one of top areas for women

Utah's metropolitan areas dominated a new survey of top locales for women entrepreneurs, according to a report by AllBusiness.com.

AllBusiness.com, a California-based business Web site, commissioned a survey of nearly 700 business executives — including 287 women — at small- to medium-sized businesses, asking them to rank various attributes by importance.

It then looked at the federal government's list of 379 metropolitan areas, with a close eye toward three main factors: indicators of economic growth and business incubation, and a third area, which looked for areas with low crime rates, low property tax rates, high household income, modest real estate prices, rapid population growth and pedestrian-friendliness. Those factors were chosen and weighted because female respondents ranked them of particular importance.

Based on those factors, AllBusiness found that four of the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas for women entrepreneurs are in Utah, including Provo-Orem, St. George, Ogden-Clearfield and Logan.

"I'm not surprised," said Erica Whittlinger, member and Salt Lake City Chapter facilitator of the Women Presidents' Organization. "I think the results of the survey are just a testimony to the wonderful quality of life we have here in Utah, and to see so many of our major areas included is wonderful. We've really blanketed the whole state."

Whittlinger said the survey's emphasis on certain "family-friendly" factors — low crime rates, for example, and pedestrian-friendliness — perhaps does reflect a difference in women's approach to business ownership and may have swung the results in Utah's favor.

"I think part of it is that clearly these sorts of factors, I think women may think of them more as business issues than men do," Whittlinger said. "In general, they are more family-friendly values.

"But the cities on this list, they just look like great places to live. I think many of them would rank very high on any lists of quality of life factors. I don't know if it's the nice areas that encourage women to become entrepreneurs, or if women entrepreneurs pick these areas. I think it's a little bit of both."

Beth Colosimo, a WPO member and owner of Wasatch Home, a home furnishing store in Draper, opened her business 21 months ago because she wanted to have a career on her own terms. After 20 decades toiling in "Corporate America," Colosimo said she wanted to assert some control: over time spent with her family, her career path trajectory, her destiny.