Women entrepreneurs know the feeling of launch season. The product is ready, the first customers are buying, and the plans are big: hire a team, go digital, sell overseas. A new global report from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor confirms that women are showing up at the starting line with exactly that kind of ambition. The harder truth in the data is what happens a few years later, when far too many of those high-growth businesses never make it to the established stage.
The GEM 2025/2026 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report, released October 8, surveyed 150,799 adults across 48 economies. Among women running early-stage businesses, 6.0% showed high-potential activity, meaning ventures built around innovation, exports or significant job creation. Among women running established businesses, that rate fell to just 0.1%, a drop of 98%. The report also found that the ratio of women to men in established business ownership sits at 0.69, the widest gender gap at any stage of the business life cycle.
Women Entrepreneurs Are Leading the Innovation
The early-stage numbers tell a powerful story about who is building the future of business. Women represented 44% of entrepreneurs emphasizing digitalization, 43% of those reporting AI innovation and 42% of those introducing new products or processes. They also made up about 40% of entrepreneurs targeting international markets, 37% of those expecting more than a quarter of their revenue from exports and 33% of those expecting to create 20 or more jobs within five years. Overall, women led about 40% of high-potential new businesses worldwide.
Participation is strong at the starting line as well. About 12% of women surveyed were running new businesses, close to the 14% rate for men, and in Chile, El Salvador, India, Israel and Oman, women outpaced men in new business activity. Women are clearly not short on ideas, skills or drive. The gap opens later, in the years when a promising business needs capital, support and time to grow into a company that lasts.
Where the Momentum Gets Lost
Money is a major part of the picture. Only 6.7% of women reported recent investment in their businesses, compared with 9.2% of men, and women invested roughly one-third less capital on average. Informal investment, the money that comes from friends, family and personal networks, flowed overwhelmingly to men, who received about 70% of it. For Black women founders, who have long built businesses with less access to both bank lending and networks of wealth, those numbers will feel familiar.
Life outside the business plays a role too. Women in the survey were 55% more likely than men to name family or personal circumstances as the reason they exited a business, at 20% compared with 13%. Caregiving does not pause for a growth stage, and many women are building companies while carrying the needs of children, parents and extended family at the same time. The report treats that reality as a business issue, listing caregiving support among its recommendations for keeping women’s companies alive.
The Road From Startup to Staying Power
GEM’s researchers lay out six directions for closing the gap: measuring what matters, supporting survival and scale instead of only startups, expanding women’s access to digital and innovation ecosystems, investing in women’s investment networks, opening more sectors to high-potential entry and addressing caregiving challenges directly. The second point stands out for women already in business. Programs, grants and competitions tend to celebrate the launch, while the years that decide whether a company survives often get far less attention and far less funding.
For women entrepreneurs building right now, the findings are both a warning and a vote of confidence. The ideas, the innovation and the global ambition are already there, and women are leading in the areas that will define the next decade of business, from AI to digital commerce. The work ahead is making sure more of those businesses get the capital, networks and support they need to reach year five, year ten and beyond, so the women who start strong get the chance to finish as owners of companies that last.
Keep building: Women’s Business Centers Get a $5.3 Million Boost From the SBA and 7 Knowledge Gaps Costing Women Entrepreneurs Time and Money.
