The Changing Face of Entrepreneurship

Women, particularly women of color, are launching companies in greater numbers than ever before. But funding remains a big problem

- By Kerri Anne Renzulli

WHEN RIHANNA PAUSED MIDWAY through her Super Bowl halftime performance to wipe the shine from her face with Fenty Beauty blotting powder, it was her flair for business, not her voice, that was momentarily on bold display. That three-second touch up, coupled with the bright lip she sported (Fenty's new Icon Velvet Liquid Lipstick in "MVP" red) and the outfits worn by her backup dancers (from her Savage X Fenty lingerie line, of course), garnered the Fenty brand a cool $7.8 million in the first 12 hours after the game, according to Launch metrics, which measures the monetary value of media marketing strategies.

Seizing the opportunity, as Rihanna did at the Super Bowl, is what successful entrepreneurs do best. But ingenuity is not the only thing that new company founders increasingly have in common with the Fenty CEO. Since the start of the pandemic, women, particularly women of color, have become the leading drivers of business creation in the U.S. In 2020 and 2021, women accounted for 49 percent of new business launches, according to a study by Gusto, a human resources software company, compared to 42 percent for men in 2021. Meanwhile, nearly half of female-led startups in 2020 were launched by women of color. In 2019, the share of new companies founded by women was just 28 percent.

"We're in a renaissance of entrepreneurship and it is being fueled by groups that have been traditionally left out, like women and people of color," says Luke Pardue, an economist at Gusto who led the study.