Women-owned businesses are growing faster than ever
The headline numbers tell an encouraging story. There are now 14.5 million women-owned businesses in the United States, accounting for 39.2% of all firms, per the Wells Fargo 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report. The US Census Bureau’s most recent count, released in late 2025, lands close to that figure too, putting women’s ownership at 14.2 million businesses generating $2.8 trillion in receipts.
In Europe, the picture has barely moved since the original wave of EU gender-entrepreneurship research: women still make up just 34.4% of the EU’s self-employed and roughly 31% of start-up entrepreneurs, despite accounting for the majority of the population.
► Browse top schools to find the best for you.
Women-owned businesses are growing faster than ever
The headline numbers tell an encouraging story. There are now 14.5 million women-owned businesses in the United States, accounting for 39.2% of all firms, per the Wells Fargo 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report. The US Census Bureau’s most recent count, released in late 2025, lands close to that figure too, putting women’s ownership at 14.2 million businesses generating $2.8 trillion in receipts.
In Europe, the picture has barely moved since the original wave of EU gender-entrepreneurship research: women still make up just 34.4% of the EU’s self-employed and roughly 31% of start-up entrepreneurs, despite accounting for the majority of the population.
The challenges haven’t disappeared; they’ve shifted.
Funding remains the biggest barrier
The capital gap that defined the original conversation around women entrepreneurs is, frustratingly, still very much intact. Of the $289 billion invested in venture capital globally in 2024, female-only founding teams received just 2.3% ($6.7 billion), compared with 83.6% ($241.9 billion) for all-male teams, according to Founders Forum Group’s 2025 analysis. That 2.3% figure was actually an improvement on 2023’s 2.1% - progress so slow that, at the current rate, parity wouldn’t arrive for decades.
What makes this gap especially hard to justify is the performance data behind it. A 2018 BCG study of MassChallenge accelerator data found that women-founded companies generated 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested, versus 31 cents for male-founded companies - meaning the businesses that struggled hardest to raise money were, by this measure, using it more efficiently. That finding is now several years old and specific to one accelerator network, but more recent funding data suggests the underlying imbalance it describes hasn’t gone away.
There are pockets of progress worth noting. Companies with at least one female founder raised $38.8 billion in US VC funding in 2024, a 27% increase from the year before, and nearly half of angel investors are now women, which should gradually shift who gets a seat at the table when deals are decided.
READ: A Close Look at the MBA Curriculum
Respect and representation are still uneven
The cultural undercurrent the original research pointed to hasn’t gone away. Women starting and running companies still report having to work harder to be taken seriously in rooms where they’re often the only woman - a dynamic borne out in the data on mentorship and sponsorship. A recent McKinsey survey found that only 31% of women in entry-level roles had a workplace sponsor in 2025, compared with 45% of men, a gap that widens rather than narrows at senior levels.
Anu Duggal, founding partner of the Female Founders Fund, has described needing 700 meetings to secure $5.85 million in funding - a stark illustration of how much harder women often have to work for the same outcome, even when launching a fund explicitly built to back other women.
Work–life balance is still a defining tension
The dual demands of building a company and raising a family haven’t eased. Entrepreneurship still asks for total dedication and unpredictable hours, and most caregiving responsibilities still fall disproportionately on women. It remains one of the most cited reasons women either delay starting a business or scale it more conservatively than they might otherwise choose to.
Where the momentum is building
It isn’t all headwinds. The number of women running Fortune 500 companies hit a record high in 2025, with 55 women CEOs leading the country’s largest firms by revenue. Major institutional commitments are also starting to follow the data: the Tory Burch Foundation pledged $1 billion in support of women entrepreneurs by 2030, aiming directly at the revenue ceiling so many women-owned businesses hit - only 4.2% of US women-owned businesses currently surpass $1 million in annual revenue.
READ: The MBA as a Bridge to the Real Business World
How an MBA fits into the picture
Research has long suggested that an MBA, while not a prerequisite for entrepreneurship, gives founders a real edge, and the most current data still backs that up, with some important nuance.
Access to capital and networks. The case for an MBA’s network effect is durable, even if the most cited statistics on it are dated. A widely cited MBA Fund analysis of roughly 2,000 companies found that startups founded by Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton MBA students and alumni were 35% more likely to raise $10 million or more in funding, and 20% more likely to be valued above $100 million, than comparable non-MBA-founded companies. A similar vintage Pitchbook ranking found the same three schools at the top of the list for venture-backed unicorn founders.
The pay gain is real, but the honest picture is more complicated. Forté Foundation’s 2025 MBA Outcomes report, a survey of 1,047 MBA alumni fielded in late 2024, the most current data available, found that women’s salaries jumped 52% in their first post-MBA job, to $131,449 on average, while men’s salaries rose 73%, to $140,007.
The pay bump is real and substantial for women but it’s smaller than the bump men get from the same degree, and that gap compounds over a career. In current roles, men now average $216,487 (a 168% increase from their pre-MBA salary) versus $179,987 for women (a 108% increase) - a 17% gap that Forté’s research shows has not narrowed since its 2021 and 2023 surveys. The honest takeaway: an MBA still meaningfully boosts a woman’s earning power and opens doors, but it doesn’t by itself close the structural pay and promotion gap. Forté’s same survey found men reported an average of 2.3 promotions since their MBA, compared with 1.4 for women, and that gap has widened, not narrowed, since 2023.
READ: Inside the Manchester Met MBA with Dr Anastasia Kynighou
What this still comes back to
Samantha Henderson, Co-Founder & President of US drop ship solution provider RevCascade, has long argued that the real value of an MBA for an entrepreneur isn’t the credential - it’s the exposure to ideas that challenge your original plan.
“Whether that means leaving a company to develop a startup idea or ditching a startup idea to pursue a career in an industry you’ve just become excited about, you should be open to ideas that flip your original assumptions on their head,”
she told Entrepreneur.com.
That openness matters just as much now as it did when she said it. The data on funding gaps, pay gaps, and promotion gaps points the same direction it did when BCG first studied this in 2018: women entrepreneurs aren’t held back by a lack of ambition or results. They’re held back by unequal access to capital, networks, and sponsorship. An MBA can narrow that gap, especially at schools with strong alumni networks, but closing it the rest of the way will take more than a degree. It will take investors, employers, and institutions acting on data that, however imperfectly updated, has been pointing in the same direction for years.
Women have spent decades proving they can build and run successful companies. What’s still missing isn’t proof, it’s a level playing field.
Originally published: 10 October 2019
Updated: 6 July 2026
