These are the top 25 cities for women entrepreneurs worldwide

Dell has announced findings of the 2016 Women Entrepreneur Cities Index (WE Cities), revealing the top 25 global cities fostering high potential women entrepreneurs (HPWE).

WE Cities is the only global gender-specific index that looks at a city’s ability to attract and foster growth in firms founded by women entrepreneurs.

Cities, instead of countries, were identified in order to show the impact of local policies and programs in addition to national laws and customs.

The findings from WE Cities are being used as a springboard for conversation and change at the seventh annual Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network Summit (DWEN)—a global gathering of 200 of the top female entrepreneurs, business leaders, media and Dell partners that is taking place in Cape Town, South Africa.

Building on the past four years of Dell’s research on HPWE, five important categories of city characteristics were identified: capital, technology, talent, culture and markets.

These pillars were organized into two groups – operating environment and enabling environment.

The overall rating has 70 indicators, and, of these, 44 have a gender-based component. Individual indicators were weighted based on four criteria: relevance, quality of underlying data, uniqueness in the index and gender component.