There is a version of this question that gets asked constantly and answered badly. It goes: are women more nurturing, more collaborative, more people-focused, less interested in money?
That framing produces nothing useful. It flatters some women, insults others, and tells you nothing you could act on. Worse, it quietly suggests women are better at the soft parts and shakier on the numbers — which is neither true nor harmless when the person reading it is deciding whether to raise her prices.
There are real differences between women-owned and male-owned businesses. They are structural rather than temperamental, they are measurable, and they matter enormously to how you run yours.
Most women-owned businesses have one owner
This is the finding that explains more than any other. U.S. Census Bureau analysis of the Annual Business Survey found that women-owned businesses were consistently more likely than male-owned businesses to have a single owner between 2018 and 2021, averaging 59.2%.
Read that as an operating condition, not a statistic. A sole owner has no co-founder. Nobody carrying the same risk, seeing the same numbers, who can be told the truth without consequence. Every decision that would otherwise get argued out between two people is made by one person — and the argument either happens internally or doesn’t happen at all.
That has nothing to do with temperament. It changes what the business needs: outside counsel isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the replacement for a structural component the company doesn’t have.
The businesses are differently shaped
In 2021, women owned 42.1% of the nation’s nonemployer businesses — 12.0 million of 28.5 million firms with no paid employees, generating $365.2 billion in receipts.
Meanwhile 1,356,990 employer businesses were women-owned as of 2023.
Both numbers are large. But the distribution tells you something: an enormous share of women’s business ownership sits in firms that have never hired anybody. Whether that reflects choice, capital access, sector, caring responsibilities or all four, the practical consequence is the same — a great many women owners cross the line from working alone to employing people without anyone around them who has done it before.
That transition is hard for everyone. It is harder without a peer who has already made it.
The growth is real, and it is not where people assume
The number of employer businesses owned by women rose nearly 20% between 2017 and 2023, from 1,134,549 to 1,356,990.
Underneath that headline, the movement is sharper at the edges. Over the same period, minority women-owned employer firms grew 49.8%. Female veteran-owned employer firms grew 25.7%.
So the fastest growth in American women’s business ownership is happening among women who are also navigating something else. That is worth knowing if you write, sell to, or build community for this audience — the centre of gravity is moving.
What this means for running one
- Assume you need external counsel, structurally. Not because you doubt yourself, but because a single-owner business has no built-in challenge function. Three or four peers at a similar stage does the job a co-founder would have done.
- Talk about money specifically. The most valuable thing a peer can tell you is a real number — what they charge, what they pay themselves, what their margin is. Pricing errors are usually information errors, and they persist in isolation.
- Plan the first hire before you need one. If you are in the nonemployer majority and intend not to be, find someone who has crossed that line and ask what they got wrong.
- Be careful what you read. A great deal of writing about women in business is encouragement dressed as analysis. Encouragement is pleasant. It will not tell you whether your prices are wrong.
The difference worth naming
Not sensitivity. Not collaboration. Not some greater interest in people over profit.
The difference is that a majority of women running businesses are running them alone, in the specific sense that matters — one owner, one person holding every decision, no structural counterweight.
That is not a deficit in the owner. It is a feature of how the business is built, and unlike temperament, it is something you can do something about.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
