2025 FEMALE FOUNDERS 500

THE PANDEMIC DROVE WOMEN OUT OF THE WORKFORCE THEN SPURRED AN ENTREPRENEURIAL EXPLOSION.

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THE NEW FEMALE FOUNDER MODE

By Issie Lapowsky

Every month for the past several years, Cate Luzio has been inviting groups of women to the Manhattan headquarters of Luminary, the professional education and networking company she founded in 2018 and leads as CEO. Over intimate dinners and cheery breakfasts on the rooftop, enclosed, fittingly, by a great glass ceiling, they have spent hours delving into the different ways they define success.

For a long time, Luzio says, that definition was clear: "It was all about getting to the top. How do I get there? How fast can I get there? And by what means?"

Then came the pandemic, and with it, what Luzio calls a "reset on priorities." The race to the C-suite gave way to the desire among these women for more flexibility, more family time, and more freedom to design their own destinies. "What we consistently hear is, 'The priorities that I had before are not the priorities that I have today," says Luzio. "People are saying, 'I'm just going to do my own thing.""

It turns out that wasn't just brunch banter. Five years since lockdowns drove an estimated two million women out of the workforce, female entrepreneurship in the U.S. has skyrocketed, with women starting businesses at nearly twice the rate of men between 2019 and 2023, according to Wells Fargo. They're not just starting more companies, but growing their revenue and head count faster, too.

It's also a trend abroad, where women now represent one in three "high-growth" entrepreneurs across 30 countries, according to a recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report. "We, for the first time, have data showing that all of the policy and programming that's emerged over the past 20 years to support women entrepreneurs is working," says Amanda Elam, lead author of the GEM report and a research fellow at the Diana International Research Institute at Babson College.