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Women in Business Statistics

The most comprehensive collection of statistics on women in business, covering ownership rates, funding gaps, revenue, industry breakdowns, and workforce trends.

Updated March 23, 2026

When people talk about the gender gap in business, they usually mean the pay gap. That one gets measured, reported, and debated every year. The ownership gap, the funding gap, the revenue gap get less systematic attention, which makes them easier to misunderstand.

Women own 39 percent of all businesses in the United States, which sounds like something close to parity. Those 14.5 million firms generate $3.3 trillion in annual revenue and employ 12.9 million workers, but they account for just 6.2 percent of total U.S. business revenue. Men own 55 percent of businesses and account for 36 percent of revenue. Women own 39 percent and account for 6.2 percent. That gap between ownership share and revenue share is what every statistic on this page is trying to explain.

Women-Owned Businesses

The growth numbers over the last five years are genuinely good. Women-owned businesses grew 94.3 percent faster than men-owned businesses from 2019 to 2024, and the profile of who’s founding them is changing fast: 64 percent of new women-owned startups in 2023 were founded by women of color. The direction of that number matters as much as the number itself.

  • 14.5 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. (2024) (Wells Fargo / WIPP Education Institute, 2024 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses)
  • Women own 39.2% of all U.S. businesses (2024) (Wells Fargo / WIPP)
  • 1.3 million women-owned businesses have at least one employee, out of 5.9 million total employer firms (U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Business Survey, 2022 data)
  • Women-owned employer firms represent 22.3% of all employer businesses (Census Bureau, ABS 2022)
  • Women-owned employer firms grew 15.4% from 2017 to 2022, from 1.13 million to 1.31 million (SBA Office of Advocacy, Women Ownership Statistics 2024)
  • From 2019 to 2024, the number of women-owned businesses grew 94.3% faster than men-owned businesses (Wells Fargo / WIPP)
  • 64% of new women-owned businesses started in 2023 were founded by women of color (Wells Fargo / WIPP, 2024 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses)

Revenue and Economic Impact

The revenue gap is more extreme than most people realize, and it persists even as the ownership numbers improve. Women-owned businesses grew employment 252.8 percent faster than men-owned from 2019 to 2023, and still account for 6.2 percent of business revenue.

  • $3.3 trillion in annual revenue generated by women-owned businesses (2024) (NWBC 2024 Annual Report / Wells Fargo)
  • Women-owned businesses account for 6.2% of total U.S. business revenue (2024) (NWBC 2024 Annual Report)
  • Women-owned employer firms generated $2.1 trillion in receipts and $508.5 billion in annual payroll (Census Bureau, ABS 2022)
  • Women-owned businesses employ 12.9 million workers, representing 9.6% of the total U.S. workforce (2024) (NWBC 2024 Annual Report)
  • Revenue for women-owned businesses grew 53.8% from 2019 to 2024 (Wells Fargo / WIPP)
  • Women-owned businesses grew employment 252.8% faster than men-owned businesses from 2019 to 2023 (Wells Fargo / WIPP)
  • If women-owned businesses achieved the same average revenue as men-owned businesses, the U.S. economy would gain $10.2 trillion in additional annual revenue (NWBC 2024 Annual Report)
  • At the current pace of convergence, revenue parity is projected to arrive in 2264 (NWBC 2024 Annual Report / Wells Fargo)

For reference: men own 54.9 percent of businesses, account for 36.2 percent of employment, and 35.9 percent of total revenue. Their ownership-to-revenue ratio is roughly 2:1. Women’s is roughly 6:1 in the wrong direction. Revenue parity in 2264 is not a typo.

Funding and Investment

The funding gap is the most documented disparity in women’s entrepreneurship and possibly the most resistant to change. The same basic patterns have held across more than a decade of tracking.

Venture Capital

  • Companies founded solely by women received 1% of all U.S. venture capital in 2024, down from 2% in 2023 (PitchBook, 2024 US All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem)
  • Startups with at least one female founder received 19.9% of deal value in 2024, down from 20.8% in 2023 (PitchBook, 2024 US All In)
  • In absolute terms: 816 female-founded startups received VC deals in 2024 versus 9,340 male-founded startups (PitchBook, 2024 US All In)
  • Female-founded startups raised $3.7 billion total in 2024; male-founded startups raised $154 billion (PitchBook, 2024 US All In)
  • Women make up 17.3% of decision-makers at U.S. VC firms with at least $50 million AUM (PitchBook, 2024 US All In)
  • Women investors are 2.5 times more likely than men to invest in women-founded companies (OECD, Bridging the Finance Gap for Women Entrepreneurs, 2024)

Loan Access

  • 25% of women are denied a business loan versus 19% of men (Federal lending research, cited in SBA Finance resources, 2024)
  • Women-managed firms receive 39% lower loan amounts than men-managed firms, conditional on being approved (Federal lending research, 2024)
  • SBA-backed loans to women-owned small businesses increased nearly 70% between FY2020 and FY2023, reaching $5.1 billion annually (NWBC 2024 Annual Report)
  • The global finance gap for women entrepreneurs is estimated at $1.7 trillion (World Economic Forum, 2023, citing IFC/World Bank data)

The Question VCs Ask

Investors are more likely to ask male founders about potential gains and female founders about potential losses, a pattern that holds even when the investor is a woman. It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a decision-making problem that runs deeper than any diversity initiative most VC firms have announced in the last five years. (Harvard Business Review research, cited in PitchBook, 2024)

Industry Breakdown

Women-owned businesses are concentrated in sectors that are lower-revenue by structure. Health care and professional services are skilled, legitimate industries, but they have revenue ceilings that manufacturing, finance, and technology don’t have. That concentration explains a significant portion of the overall revenue gap without excusing any of it.

Where Women-Owned Businesses Are Most Concentrated (all firms, 2024)

IndustryShare of Women-Owned Businesses
Professional, Scientific & Technical Services15.6%
Health Care & Social Assistance14.4%
Other Services13.4%
Administrative Support & Waste Management13.3%
Retail Trade11.6%

Where Women-Owned Employer Firms Are Most Concentrated (2024)

IndustryShare of Women-Owned Employer Firms
Health Care & Social Assistance17.6%
Professional, Scientific & Technical Services16.7%
Retail Trade9.6%
Other Services8.3%
Administrative Support5.7%

Source: NWBC 2024 Annual Report, data from Wells Fargo / WIPP / Ventureneer

The trend is moving. Women-owned businesses are diversifying into food and accommodations, real estate, and transportation and warehousing, which is gradually reducing concentration in the historically dominant sectors.

Workforce and Leadership

The C-Suite

Women hold 29 percent of C-suite positions in 2024, up from 17 percent in 2015, which is real progress. The broken rung is why the pace is slow: for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women reach the same level. The pipeline isn’t broken at the top. It’s broken at the first step up.

  • Women hold 29% of C-suite positions (2024), up from 17% in 2015 (McKinsey / LeanIn.org, Women in the Workplace 2024)
  • Women of color hold 7% of C-suite roles (McKinsey, 2024)
  • For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women are promoted, a structural bottleneck called the “broken rung” (McKinsey, 2024)
  • Women make up 39% of manager-level roles but only 28% at the SVP level (McKinsey, Women in the Workplace 2024)

Corporate Boards

  • Women represent 34% of all S&P 500 directors (2024), up from 19% a decade ago (Spencer Stuart, 2024 U.S. Board Index)
  • 46% of first-time director appointments in 2024 were women, down 10 points from 2023 (Spencer Stuart, 2024 U.S. Board Index)
  • Women serve as independent board chairs at 18% of S&P 500 companies (Spencer Stuart, 2024)

The Pay Gap

  • Women working full-time earned a median $57,520 versus men’s $71,090 in 2024, a ratio of approximately 81 cents per dollar (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024)
  • By another measure: women’s median earnings were 83.6% of men’s among full-time, year-round workers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024)
  • Women ages 25 to 34 earn 95 cents for every dollar men earn, the narrowest gap by age cohort (Pew Research Center, 2025)
  • The gap has narrowed from 35 cents in 1982 to approximately 15 to 19 cents in 2024 (Pew Research Center / Census Bureau)

The gap has closed by roughly 20 cents over 40 years, averaging about half a cent per year. At that pace, full pay parity arrives sometime around 2064, assuming the rate holds, which it hasn’t consistently.

Barriers and Challenges

Capital Access

What I’ve found looking across every major source on this is that the data is unusually consistent: women face higher rejection rates, receive lower loan amounts when approved, and operate in a VC environment that systematically underfunds them relative to their actual performance. The variation across studies is in the exact percentages, not in the direction.

  • Women entrepreneurs are approximately 63% less likely to secure VC funding compared to men (OECD, Bridging the Finance Gap for Women Entrepreneurs, 2024)
  • Two-thirds of informal investments (from angel investors, friends, and family) go to men (OECD, 2024)
  • The global finance gap for women entrepreneurs is $1.7 trillion (IFC/World Bank, via WEF, 2023)

The Structural Problem

The broken rung in corporate America and the funding gap in entrepreneurship are versions of the same dynamic: women are filtered out before they reach the levels where decisions are made and capital is deployed. At 29 percent of the C-suite and 17.3 percent of VC decision-makers, the people allocating resources are still mostly men, and the research shows this matters directly. VC firms with 30 percent or more female partners invest 4.7 times more in female founders. Only 4.9 percent of VC firms have a majority of female partners. The math is not complicated.

Global Picture

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest female entrepreneurship rate in the world, with roughly 26 percent of adult women entrepreneurially active. Women there receive about 3 percent of startup finance. That combination of high participation and near-zero capital access is the clearest illustration anywhere of what the funding gap actually costs an economy.

  • Women globally start new businesses at a rate of roughly 1 in 10, compared to 1 in 8 for men (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, Women’s Entrepreneurship 2024)
  • Across OECD countries from 2019 to 2023, approximately 3 women work on a startup for every 4 men (OECD, 2024)
  • Women are approximately 41% less likely than men to expect their business to create 19 or more jobs in the next five years in OECD countries (OECD, 2024)
  • Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship globally: approximately 26% of female adults are entrepreneurially active (World Bank, via GEM / WEF, 2023)
  • Women founders in Africa receive approximately 3% of startup finance despite leading a quarter of the region’s businesses (World Bank, 2023)
  • Women’s startup rates increased in 19 of 47 countries surveyed between 2023 and 2024, with Jordan and Morocco doubling their rates (GEM, Women’s Entrepreneurship Report 2024)

The highest female entrepreneurship rates are in regions with the least access to formal capital, and the lowest rates are in high-income countries with the most capital available. Access to capital doesn’t just measure economic development. It causes it.

Sources

See Also

Related entries

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Equity and Ownership Structures

The Richest Women in the World

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