We Need More Women Founders, Now, More Than Ever

Once upon a time, before industrialization, the primary unit of economic productivity was the household. Women in pre-industrial societies would serve as manufacturers of market goods like cloth and yarn, which could be sold or traded for needed household goods. The earliest days of industrialization, and what we call the “market revolution” that birthed modern capitalism, took advantage of this existing informal infrastructure, subcontracting manufacturing of textiles, pins, shoes, and other consumer products to the people who’d been making them since time immemorial: women working out of the home. Others found economic advancement in craft products like needlework, or in ad-hoc retail as street hawkers.
In other words, women were core to the creation of the modern economy, and have remained so even as that same economy worked tirelessly to shut us out. We’ve always had reduced access to capital and face systemic barriers to simple employment and promotion, in large part due to societal assumptions about what was and was not “appropriate” for us. Yet even though today we make up the majority of the American workforce, we’re still individually less likely to remain in it, having to jump through hoops that keep us from thriving and rising in the ranks if not pushing us out altogether. And the pandemic has only made that worse.