Precision or Paralysis: ROI for Female Founders

Written By Kellie Adkins
a black and white clock in a large building

There I am in Chemistry class listening to the professor lecturing on measurement (an essential skill for any budding chemist). The lecture turned to a critical distinction between precision and accuracy. Surely I had heard this lecture before. But this time I heard it. And it gave me a new way to evaluate my own individual efforts, which allowed my perfectionistic, striving, self a little grace. 

I was in the first year of “catch up” courses on a pathway I believed ended with a PhD in Neuroscience. After living abroad the year prior, and changing my major from Biology to Religions the years prior to that, I was swimming in a sea of self-doubt and anachronistic longings. 

What if I had stuck it out in (third year) Genetics as a first-year? 

What if I had trusted my mind enough to tackle Calculus earlier? 

Why didn’t I complete a second thesis to graduate with both a B.A. and a B.S.? I had done all the coursework! 

Why didn’t I go to Nepal after college to study with Buddhist nuns like I planned? 

Mostly: WTAF was I doing back in my hometown?

Back to the lecture: 

“Precision and accuracy get used interchangeably in everyday language, but in chemistry they measure two different things entirely,” the professor says.

Accuracy is how close a measurement lands to the true value. 

Precision is how consistently repeated measurements land in the same place, regardless of whether that place is correct. 

You can be precise and wrong — hitting the same spot over and over, confidently, nowhere near the target. 

You can be accurate and inconsistent — landing near the truth of a measurement sometimes, missing it wildly other times. The goal is both at once: tight grouping, centered on what's actually real.

This is the distinction that gutted me in that college Chemistry course. And one that I think women-in-business need to sit with, because most business (and life) advice sold to us conflates the two.

"Trust the process" is often an accuracy claim with no precision behind it. That message gets you going in a general direction with no method for consistently getting there. 

"Hustle harder" is a precision instruction with no accuracy check. That message tells you to repeat effort without verifying you're aimed at the right target. 

Repetitive effort without verifying your targeted goal isn’t a strategy–it’s a recipe for disaster.

These slogans are marketed as solutions, when, in fact, they overlook the structural and systemic forces that challenge female-and-femme-led enterprises. 

These sycophantic simplifications wear different clothes depending on who’s presenting them as solutions. Sometimes, they’re all dolled up with a side of spirituality (I’ll see your “manifesting blueprint” and raise you a “cosmic-realignment of your energy centers”). Other times, these are packaged up in sleek suits accompanied by overblown exaggerations (“Go from six-to-seven figures with my eight-point mindset map for your business”).

If you’ve been in business (especially online-adjacent) business for any length of time, you’ve seen the yucky tactics, you’ve probably slipped down one of those marketing funnels, and maybe you fell into the sticky web of contradictory platitudes telling you to “Do more, charge more, be more,” and also “Do less, don’t chase, just attract” and then, “Your bank account is up to you” but also, “You are not your bank account” and ….I could go on….but ….

The data below are my accuracy check and will drill this point home; I’ll let the data speak so this piece is grounded in what's true, not just my whiny gut-check on an exploitative, gendered power differential in business (and business advice). 

Keep the Numbers (Save the Spin)

I’m guessing y’all have sat through enough breathless pitches and “But, wait!”-filled on-demand “trainings” to know the difference between a claim and a citation. I lead with data to flesh out the problem — including the parts that complicate a tidy narrative. 

  1. these data are drawn from US sources, so they are implictlly limited as such.

  2. I’m using “women” because the data on LGBTQIA+ and femme-led enterprises are difficult to find at scale. 

  3. “Women” is itself a blended category: Single women? Married women? Black women? White women? Immigrant women? Minority women? Women who are mothers? Women who are caregivers? This category is just one “bucket” in which the data are collated. I’m not putting every woman in the same category —but the data do. In order to have better solutions, we need to articulate the problems better: that begins with better data.

Having said all that, here is what the data show.

Women are building at pace. 

It’s no longer about ownership…

Women now own roughly 14.2 to 15.7 million businesses in the U.S. — depending on whether you use Census or Wells Fargo's count — generating between $2.8 and $3.3 trillion in annual revenue (Corp! Magazine, The Broker Shop). Between 2022 and 2025, women-owned firms grew 12.1% — outpacing male-owned firms. Solo, non-employer businesses owned by women grew 62.2% faster than their male-owned counterparts over the same span.

What those data don’t show is the precision problem inside of that growth: in spite of owning roughly 40% of all U.S. businesses, women-owned firms hold only 9–9.6% of total business employment and just 4.6–6.2% of total business revenue. 

Men own 2.6 times more employer businesses than women, employ four times as many workers, and generate 7.4 times more revenue (Wells Fargo Impact Report, via Corp! Magazine). 

Women are not scaling at parity. 

…It’s about scaling.

We are starting at parity–or at least catching up— but not scaling at the same level. This gap isn't explained by ambition, acumen, or ability; the volume of new businesses proves women-in-business have that in abundance. The scaling gap is explained by structure; most women-owned businesses stay solo and self-funded, which caps growth by design, not by choice.

Venture capital data shows the same pattern in sharper relief.

2025 was widely reported as a record year: female-founded companies raised $73.6 billion, capturing 27.7% of total U.S. VC deal value for the first time (PitchBook, via Fortune). 

Peek beneath the hood of that headline, and the truth of those numbers will give you pause.

Two-thirds of that $73.6 billion went into AI. More than $30 billion of it landed at exactly two companies — Anthropic and Scale AI — both counted as "female-founded" because a woman sits on a mixed-gender founding team, not because a woman is the sole founder (Fortune). 

Women are (still) underfunded.

When you remove the two outliers above, the "record year" framing changes substantially.

For companies founded solely by women, the number is 1.1% of all VC capital deployed in 2025, down from 2.1% the year before (PitchBook–NVCA Venture Monitor). Deal count for all-women teams hit its lowest level since 2018. 

Nearly 79% of first-time VC financings in 2025 went exclusively to all-male teams. Only six new women-led VC firms launched in 2025 — the fewest since 2011 — and capital raised by women-led funds fell 37% year over year.

Women-owned companies are more profitable to investors 

Here's the finding that should reframe the whole conversation: research cited across multiple 2025–2026 industry analyses, sourced to Boston Consulting Group, found that women-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested, compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies (Femfounded). 

I want you to read that last sentence again. See where it lands in your body –especially if you are a female-led business owner. 

We (women-owned enterprises) are the most capital-efficient investment by a factor of more than two — and we receive capital like a rounding error.

That's not a performance gap. It's an allocation choice being made by people who control access to capital, and it long predates any of us individually walking into a room asking for funding.

Before the funding conversation even starts, the wage gap already shapes what capital women can self-generate.

Women (still) earn less than men

I know the headline isn’t a shocker, but… shit. In the first quarter of 2026, women's median weekly earnings were $1,098 versus $1,362 for men — 80.6% of the male median (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). For Black and Hispanic women, the gap compounds: Black women's median earnings were 85.4% of white women's, and Hispanic women's were 80.5% of white women's (BLS). For BIPOC women, credit access compounds it further — 73% report that getting a loan was somewhat to very difficult, and 45% of BIPOC applicants have never been approved for one, compared to 36% of white women (Wells Fargo, via Bizwomen). I’ve written on this topic before, including practical strategies for women in business to earn more.

What Gives? Or, What’s Actually Blocking Us

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and it isn't happening because women are worse at business. It's happening inside specific, documented structures, and precision requires naming them plainly.

Unpaid Care Work

The invisible labor tax runs before the business day even starts. Care work — childcare, eldercare, household management — is disproportionately unpaid and disproportionately performed by women, and it is excluded from GDP entirely because standard economic measurement wasn't built to count it (UNDP). In the U.S. alone, unpaid caregiving is valued at more than $1 trillion annually, with women providing $643 billion of that value (National Partnership for Women & Families, BLS American Time Use Survey). Globally, Oxfam estimates the value of women's unpaid labor at $10.9 trillion a year — more than the combined revenue of the fifty largest companies in the world (New York Times / Oxfam). This is the hidden ledger entry nobody puts on a pitch deck: the hours a founder has already worked before she opens her laptop, subsidizing an economy that doesn't record the transaction.

When people tell you money makes the world go ‘round….LOL in their face. Women’s love and (unpaid) labor makes the world go ‘round, hon. Since the dawn of f’n time (and we women are tired).

One Generation Deep

This capital gap is not ancient history (though it is the foundation HIS-story)— it's one generation deep. 

Women in the U.S. could not open a credit card in their own name, independent of a husband's signature, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974 (Forbes Advisor). That means the first generation of American women to build independent credit history, and therefore independent access to business capital, is only now reaching the years where that capital would typically compound into real intergenerational wealth. We are not behind because of some innate gap in financial capability. We are early in a structural transition that men have had roughly two more centuries to compound inside. Naming that isn't an excuse; it's the actual timeline, and it changes what "catching up" should reasonably look like.

Women’s Industries (still) Undervalued

And the industries where women concentrate get valued differently by the same market. 

Wellness, caregiving, education, coaching, "soft" service work — the fields where women-owned businesses cluster — are structurally undercapitalized relative to their economic footprint, in part because capital markets have historically treated "women's work" as inherently lower-margin, harder to scale, and less fundable, independent of the actual unit economics (UNDP). That's not a market signal. It's a blind spot with a balance sheet.

Put together: an invisible labor tax before the workday starts, one generation of independent credit history, and a capital market that structurally undervalues the industries women build in.

That's the reality and like many Both/Ands, the avenues to deal with it are contradictory. Because, none of the above are good reasons to stay small. In fact, they are the exact (dare I say, precise) reasons precision matters more for women in business than it does for someone else (read: men).

Precision Packs an Exponential Punch

Precision’s operating principle reads like a manifesto: if the system isn't allocating capital at parity (and that’s what the data show), then the resources you already control have to be deployed with more precision than someone some man building from a funded position and cushioned platform.

Precision means staying lean. 

Precision requires naming to yourself when you're in "figure it out" mode versus "execute a known method" mode. Precision requires you to understand those modes–and to meet them with completely different resources.

Precision will save you time, but it means asking someone who has already solved the specific problem you're circling, instead of re-creating an answer independently. (I know, I bristled at that last sentence, too. I’m an eldest daughter –being independent is in my DNA. Asking for help?!? Who do you think I am?) 

If some part of you still believes that “Struggle” = “Deserving” and “Isolation” = “ Strength” then please, for all that is good and holy, let those limiting beliefs go right now. Sometimes struggle is just struggle and isolation is just isolation. 

The hard truth in business is that the faster you close the gap between where you are and how to get where you want to be (by asking someone who's already solved your exact problem), the faster you’ll get there. In between, you’ll have less burnout. This is why well-funded businesses get there– wherever they’re going– faster. Money is an excellent problem-solver. 

Honesty Checkpoint: The Coaching Industry

If you’re thinking this is where I pitch you on my coaching: it isn’t (yet). I won’t insult your intelligence by handing you flattering statistics about coaching ROIs without context. If I only quoted the widely cited 5x–7x ROI figures from the International Coaching Federation and MetrixGlobal without naming that those numbers come largely from people who already believed in coaching before they paid for it, I'd be doing exactly what undercapitalizes trust in this whole category. 

A 2018 Harvard Business Publishing survey found that only about a third of business leaders reported being meaningfully more effective after a coaching or leadership program (Harvard Business Review). And, most masterminds underdeliver for reasons that have nothing to do with the strategy taught inside them: no real screening for fit, no group accountability, no ongoing feedback loop, facilitators who either overcontrol the room or disappear from it entirely (11 Reasons Mastermind Groups Fail).

The honesty checkpoint is that coaching and cohort work produce real ROI when the structure itself is, well, precise. That looks like a deliberate screening process, well-defined accountability, a coach or self-aware facilitator who can practice presence and build community, and a clear outcome instead of open-ended promises. Those decisions are educational design standards that have nothing to do with marketing (unless you practice trust-based marketing *raises hand*).

A Question without an Answer

So here's where I'll leave this, at least for today: what do we actually do about it?

Not the mindset version of that question — I'm not interested in convincing you to feel differently about a funding gap measured in trillions of dollars and a legal timeline that only started in 1974. 

I mean the structural version. 

If the invisible labor tax, the capital gap, and the undervaluing of "women's work" industries are the terrain, what does a business actually built for that terrain look like? 

What does precision — not more hustle, not more trust-the-process — require in practice, for someone starting later, funded less, and carrying more unpaid weight than the data assumes she's carrying?

I have real thoughts on this. I've spent the last several years building specific answers to it — the Wisdom Method Business Incubator and my book + corresponding course, the Purpose and Prosperity Project (I promise I’ll share more about both soon).

For now, I'm curious: how do you fill this gap yourself? Do you have your own version of precision: a method, a structural fix, or a decision framework that got you out of figure-it-out mode? I’d love to know. Reply, if you’re willing to share your thoughts. I read every comment and reply.

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Sources:

Kellie Adkins https://KellieAdkins.com
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