While more women than ever are launching businesses and stepping into leadership roles, the entrepreneurial pay gap remains wide—and it's not felt equally across generations. Younger women, especially Gen Z and millennials, are building businesses with bold purpose but face a lack of access to capital, mentorship, and institutional support. Meanwhile, Gen X and baby boomer women entrepreneurs often battle erasure, ageism, and exclusion from digital or innovation-forward fundi

Despite decades of progress, women in business continue to face significant discrimination, from funding gaps to leadership biases. While the number of women entrepreneurs and executives is steadily rising, the systems around them have not evolved at the same pace.

In an era where businesses tout inclusion, diversity, and equity as core values, a quiet but forceful resurgence of patriarchal norms is infiltrating workplace culture. Over the past year, several high-profile reversals in gender progress, hostile attitudes toward DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, and an increase in workplace discrimination lawsuits reveal that the so-called post-pandemic reset may not be as equitable as advertised.