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:
The gig economy is on the rise, and women account for an outsized share of the increase in the temporary self-employed workforce over the past 20 years. Although gig work is a steppingstone to business ownership that it may be good for more women to experience, there are also important implications of women’s self-employment for technical assistance and support providers.
This one-page fact sheet summarizes women business owners’ role in the gig economy, where gaps exist, and areas in which support can be provided
Lack of access to capital continues to be a barrier for women-owned businesses.
On average, women start their business with half as much capital as men ($75,000 vs. $135,000). Women-owned and men-owned high growth potential firms experience larger disparities in capital at the time of founding ($150,000 vs. $320,000).
Corporations use supplier diversity programs to strengthen their supply chains by cultivating the marketplace of women-owned, minority-owned, veteran-owned and LGBT-owned vendors.
These programs originated as government initiatives to foster the use of underutilized historically disenfranchised businesses.
Check out the latest numbers and characteristics in our analysis of data from the Survey of Business Owners via the United States Census.
There are 749,197 Asian women-owned businesses in the United States. Learn more about this important subset of the entrepreneurship community.
There are 1,521,494 Black women-owned businesses in the United States. This reflects an increase of 66.9% from 2007. Learn more about this important segment of the business owner community.
There are 1,469,991 Latina women-owned businesses in the United States. Learn more about this fast growing segment of the entrepreneurship economy.
Learn more about women-owned, equally-owned and men-owned business performance and if your state makes the list for most women-owned businesses!