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 Launchmetrics, 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.
What’s Driving The Surge
DURING THE PANDEMIC, NEED AND OPPORTUNITY combined to fuel the explosion of entrepreneurship among women. As COVID-19 gripped the economy, women’s labor force participation rate dipped to its lowest level since 1988 as female-dominated industries suffered the worst layoffs and mothers left their jobs to care for children stuck at home thanks to school and daycare closures. For many women, launching a business was the best option available to regain control of their careers and bring in needed income, while maintaining the flexibility to care for loved ones during lockdown.
In fact, the Gusto study found, nearly 40 percent of women who started a new business in 2020 did so as a direct result of the pandemic. Minority women, who were hit hardest by pandemic layoffs, were more than twice as likely as other women to say they’d become an entrepreneur because they were jobless or concerned about their financial situation.
“Women of color felt these disruptions to the greatest degree and have been the ones to turn the greatest obstacles into opportunities for themselves,” says Pardue. They were also, he adds, the most likely to start a business aimed at helping their community, particularly through education, health care or nonprofits.
Women also turned to becoming their own employer because they needed more flexible work hours and the ability to determine their own schedule. Nearly three in five female entrepreneurs named this as a top reason they set out on their own in 2020, while more than a quarter of female business owners with school-age children said they launched their company in 2021 because of increased care responsibilities.
“The pandemic was a reset for everyone. It allowed people to take a break from travel, engage with their families and maybe realize
