Characteristics of Women-Owned Businesses Fact Sheet
Beyond their ownership, many women-owned businesses share common traits, challenges, and strengths. Programs that calibrate for these characteristics and focus on addressing resulting needs can serve broad audiences while also activating missing entrepreneurial talent.
NWBC’s fact sheet identifies common characteristics of women-owned businesses as of 2025, and supporting data:
- They tend to be small or microbusinesses.
- Women-owned businesses have shorter tenures than male-owned counterparts, and women owners are younger than male owners.
- Women owners are more likely than men to operate a business as a second pursuit, in addition to other employment.
- Women-owned businesses are more undercapitalized.
- Women’s businesses are more likely to be negatively affected by inaccessibility of affordable child- and family care.
- Women-owned businesses are concentrated in service and retail sectors that typically experience slow growth, and limited access to tax credits and other benefits and opportunities.
Download the fact sheet here:
Based on our survey of media coverage on entrepreneurship the Council identified a gap in culture where we could better support media makers in including women entrepreneurs in their stories. As such, the Council developed a resource to contextualize the experience of women business owners and leaders and then provide tools and resources for journalists and other media makers that want more information on how to better cover women’s entrepreneurship. This resource includes key definitions, information on how to identify bias in the media, and resources to find women business owners and leaders to interview for news and media coverage.
Based on NWBC research released earlier this year, the Council created a toolkit to help entrepreneurs assess the quality of their social networks. The activities and information in this toolkit will empower women business owners to build a social network that helps them achieve their business dreams.
Women business owners with growth aspirations can contribute significantly to economic growth in the United States, but women are currently under-represented among large firms with $1 million or more in revenue. To improve access to resources required for growth, the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) created a searchable repository of 196 premiere, growth-oriented programs.
The repository was developed by identifying a catalogue of resource keywords (such as business accelerators and export assistance) and culling a list of such resources from entrepreneur-focused websites and publications. The resources were coded for goodness-of-fit indicators and analyzed in the aggregate to describe the scope of the inventory and potential gaps in programs available to women entrepreneurs through the searchable online repository, “Grow Her Business: A Resource from Start-up to Scale-up.”
Women business owners with growth aspirations can contribute significantly to economic growth in the United States, but women are currently under-represented among large firms with $1 million or more in revenue. To improve access to resources required for growth, the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) created a searchable repository of 196 premiere, growth-oriented programs. The repository was developed by identifying a catalogue of resource keywords (such as business accelerators and export assistance) and culling a list of such resources from entrepreneur-focused websites and publications. The resources were coded for goodness-of-fit indicators and analyzed in the aggregate to describe the scope of the inventory and potential gaps in programs available to women entrepreneurs through the searchable online repository, “Grow Her Business: A Resource from Start-up to Scale-up.”