In 1906, Sarah Breedlove — who would become known as Madam C.J. Walker — was a 38-year-old washerwoman earning $1.50 a day in St. Louis, Missouri. By the time she died in 1919, she was almost certainly the first female self-made millionaire in the United States, having built a hair care company serving Black American women, with thousands of sales agents and manufacturing operations across the country.

She did this while being Black in a country with legally enforced racial segregation. While being a woman in a country where women could not vote and had virtually no access to capital. While operating in an industry — personal care — that white-owned businesses largely ignored because they could not imagine Black women’s beauty as a market worth serving.

Walker’s story is told in history books now, and the telling often emphasizes her extraordinary personal qualities: her vision, her salesmanship, her willingness to reinvest, her social conscience. These qualities were real. But the structural conditions she navigated are equally important to understand, because versions of them have constrained female entrepreneurs in every era since.

The Structural Constraints: Then and Now

The history of female entrepreneurship is a history of business built around, through, and sometimes because of barriers. Women who built enterprises before the 1970s operated in legal contexts that prevented them from opening business accounts in their own names, obtaining credit, or signing contracts without male co-signatures. The formal business infrastructure that entrepreneurs depend on — banking, credit, legal contracts — was simply unavailable to women for most of the 20th century.

The barriers today are less explicit and more statistical. Women-owned businesses receive approximately 2% of venture capital funding in the United States, despite women founding roughly 20% of new businesses. This statistic has been consistent for the better part of a decade, through multiple funding booms. Women founders raise on average smaller rounds, take longer to reach profitability requirements, and exit at lower valuations than comparable male-founded companies.

The venture capital funding gap is not fully explained by sectoral differences (women do found more consumer-facing businesses and fewer deep tech companies, and VC has historically favored deep tech). Studies that control for sector, stage, and business quality still find significant gaps in funding outcomes. Research by economists Alicia Robb and Arnobio Morelix found that even when controlling for human capital, industry, and business characteristics, women-owned businesses receive significantly less external financing than comparable men-owned businesses.

The other significant structural barrier is informal: access to networks. Venture capital is a relationship-driven industry, and the social networks through which deals happen — golf, fraternity connections, shared school experiences, shared investor networks — are networks in which women have historically been underrepresented. Research by Candida Brush and others on the social capital dimension of women’s entrepreneurship finds that women’s networks, while often broader in some respects, are less likely to include the specific high-status financial networks that facilitate early-stage funding.

The Patterns: What Female Founders Have in Common

Across the history of female entrepreneurship, certain patterns appear with enough regularity to be analytically interesting.

Building in unserved markets. Madam C.J. Walker’s insight was that Black women’s hair care was a genuine and completely unserved market. Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein built cosmetics empires in the early 20th century by recognizing that women’s beauty care was a serious market at a time when the male-dominated business establishment dismissed it. Sara Blakely founded Spanx in 2000 after observing that no one had created a comfortable, functional undergarment for women that worked under fitted pants — a gap obvious to any woman, invisible to the industry.

The pattern recurs because necessity is a genuine driver of entrepreneurship, and women have historically been the users of products and services that men did not understand or prioritize. The knowledge asymmetry — women knowing what women need in ways that male founders often don’t — has been a persistent source of female entrepreneurial advantage in consumer markets.

Bootstrapping and resourcefulness. Women founders, historically unable to access external capital easily, have tended to build businesses through organic growth, reinvestment of revenues, and extreme resource efficiency. Sara Blakely famously used her $5,000 in personal savings and no outside investment until Spanx was a profitable business. Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions was built from the ownership rights she negotiated for her talk show before she was the most powerful woman in American television.

Research on bootstrapped vs. venture-funded businesses finds that bootstrapped businesses often develop more sustainable unit economics and stronger customer relationships precisely because they cannot rely on capital to compensate for weak business fundamentals. The constraint of no capital is genuinely harder. The businesses that survive it are often better built.

Social mission alongside profit. Women entrepreneurs, across many studies, are more likely than male entrepreneurs to articulate social goals alongside profit goals, and more likely to build social mission into business structure. Walker used her wealth and business platform for civil rights advocacy. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop on environmental and ethical sourcing principles before these were mainstream business concepts. Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia is the most cited example of mission-driven business, but women founders have been doing this at scale for a century.

This is not without risk — social mission can distract from business execution, and the research on whether social mission correlates with business performance is mixed. But it is a consistent pattern, and it has produced some of the most enduring brands in consumer markets.

The Names: A Non-Exhaustive Map

Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919) built the first Black hair care empire. Elizabeth Arden (1878-1966) built a global cosmetics company that was one of the most valuable brands in the world at her death. Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965) built her cosmetics empire simultaneously, in competition with Arden, from Polish-Jewish immigrant origins. Mary Kay Ash (1918-2001) founded Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963 — at a time when she had been passed over for promotion in favor of a man she had trained — and built one of the largest direct sales organizations in the world.

Katharine Graham (1917-2001) did not found The Washington Post, but she rebuilt and led it through its most consequential years — the Pentagon Papers, Watergate — becoming the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) built a media empire that included production, publishing, cable television, and investment, and became the first Black female billionaire.

Debbi Fields (b. 1956) built Mrs. Fields from a single cookie store in 1977 to a global chain, in the face of repeated advice from business consultants that no one would pay premium prices for freshly baked cookies. Sara Blakely (b. 1971) built Spanx into a billion-dollar business as a sole founder with no outside investment until a majority stake was sold to Blackstone in 2021. Whitney Wolfe Herd (b. 1989) founded Bumble as the first dating app that required women to make the first contact, taking it public in 2021.

The pattern in this list: the businesses built by women frequently addressed unserved markets, often markets that male-dominated industries had explicitly dismissed. The founders were frequently told their ideas were bad before they were proved right.

What Has Changed

The landscape for female founders has shifted significantly, if unevenly, since the 2010s. The number of investment firms specifically focused on female-founded or female-led companies has grown. Organizations like All Raise have worked to improve the pipeline of female venture capitalists — if the people making investment decisions are more likely to include women, the pattern of dismissing female-founded businesses may improve. Female-focused accelerators and incubators have proliferated.

The data on funding outcomes is improving, slowly. The 2% figure is moving, but it is moving slowly. The structural features of venture capital — its social network dependence, its pattern-matching (investing in people who look like previous successes), its late-night culture — do not transform quickly.

What has changed more significantly is the cultural infrastructure: the number of platforms, communities, and media properties focused on female entrepreneurship, providing models, networks, and knowledge that were not accessible to previous generations. The aspiration to entrepreneurship is higher among young women than in any previous generation, and the resources to support that aspiration, while still inadequate, are more present.

The Ongoing Constraint

Venture capital is one piece of the picture. The broader structural constraint that applies to all women who want to build businesses at scale is the same one that applies to women who want to advance in large organizations: caregiving.

The research on female entrepreneurship and family consistently finds that marriage and children affect women’s entrepreneurship differently than men’s. For men, marriage and children are associated with higher rates of entrepreneurial activity — possibly because family provides motivation and a domestic partner provides support. For women, children are associated with lower rates of entrepreneurial activity and lower growth aspirations in existing businesses, because the caregiving demands fall disproportionately on women and the structures of most societies have not changed enough to alter this.

The women who have built the largest businesses — Oprah (no children), Sara Blakely (built Spanx before her children were born, with access to significant household support after), Whitney Wolfe Herd (founded Bumble, had her first child after Bumble’s early scaling) — have often navigated the timing in specific ways, or had access to caregiving resources that most women do not.

This is not an argument against women having children or building businesses. It is an argument that the caregiving infrastructure of most societies remains inadequate for the ambitions of women who want to do both.

The women who built, historically, built against serious odds. The odds have improved. They have not been eliminated.

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