(flickr.com/flickr4jazz)

Much has been made of tech’s gender divide, with the seeming consensus being that this industry is something of a sausagefest and no one knows how to fix it. But buried within this TechCrunch report, drawing on statistics from Startup Genome, is an eye-catching little factoid: Compared to Silicon Valley and London (which are running at 80:20 versus 90:10 ratios), New York has almost double the rate of female founders.

We’ve remarked upon this trend ourselves, but those numbers are pretty stark. So naturally we can’t help but speculate recklessly as to why this might be the case. Could it have something to do with New York’s comparatively more recent rise to startup hub status? Maybe the lack of an established old boys’ network makes for a different ratio. Perhaps it’s related to demographics, or maybe it’s partly an outgrowth of the boom in female-friendly fashion and beauty startups. Whatever the reason, it's a trend we welcome here at Ladybeat.

A couple of other interesting stats from the report:

• In New York, there’s a scale-stage spike--from 45 percent to 67 percent--in high risk companies. That’s four times as many scale-stage high-risk companies as Silicon Valley. But scale-stage startups also raise 27 percent more money in the Alley than the Valley.
• Local entrepreneurs are 4.3 times as likely to list “content” as their competitive advantage. (This inspires us to wonder what percentage of these startups are founded and/or staffed by literary liberal arts refugees.)

And lastly, something that comes as a surprise to absolutely no one: hometown hero Fred Wilson is the city’s favorite startup expert. Duh.