The country is in a recession, and Washington is tangling over how to create new jobs, but, according to a new paper from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, there’s a fairly simple potential source of them sitting right under our noses.

Women start high-growth companies, like those in high tech, at lower rates than men do, Kauffman-supported research has found. But the reason for this is systemic, rather than due to women’s innate capacity for entrepreneurialism, says the paper, titled “Overcoming the Gender Gap: Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers.”

The paper, released today, is authored by Kauffman vice president Lesa Mitchell. With a few key changes, we can encourage more women to start companies and, in turn, unleash a slew of new jobs, Mitchell tells Fast Company.

“If we’re looking for an answer to jobs,” Mitchell says, “it’s right in front of our face.”

While there are plenty of women in science and technology–the fields that spin off high-growth companies–the paper says, and while women form 46% of the workforce and over 50% of college students, only 35% of startup business owners are women.

In fields like science and technology, that’s due to the fact that women in those fields don’t take the same steps that men do to position themselves to one day start their own companies, the paper says. They don’t patent their research as much as men do–only at 40% the rate of their male colleagues. They don’t serve on the scientific advisory boards of private companies the way men do–93% of men serve on boards in private industry while only 6.5% of women do. And women tend to commercialize their research through university channels, rather than striking out on their own.