Female workers are powering America's entrepreneurship boom. It's not because they want to.
By Jennifer Ortakales Dawkins and Madison Hoff
Graphic by Savanna Durr/Insider.
Published June 9, 2022.
In February 2021, Jamie LaDuca returned from maternity leave to learn she'd be furloughed for a second time.
"I had been working so, so hard," she said. But it seemed like her hard work wasn't enough.
Every weekday, LaDuca went from one Zoom meeting to another, picked up her 6-month-old daughter and 3-year-old son from day care, got dinner on the table, put the kids to bed, and then logged back online to finish work. She felt like a hamster on a never-ending wheel.
"I deserve better than this," she told herself. That was the moment she decided it was time for a change.
Determined to take control of her career, LaDuca, 37, used the monthlong furlough to formulate a business with her friend and register for an LLC. In June 2021, she quit her job, and they launched a public-relations agency, 143 Communications.
LaDuca represents one of the 1.4 million mothers who lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce last year. In fact, women lost twice as many jobs as men during the pandemic and recouped only half. Burned out from juggling the pressures of family, finances, and career, many did something they never imagined they'd do: become their own bosses.
Entrepreneurship, once an endeavor marked by risk-tolerant visionaries hoping to make something of their ideas, is now fueled by female workers who feel they don't have full control of their lives. Women are powering America's entrepreneurship boom not because they want to but because they have to.
"Before the pandemic, entrepreneurship was reserved for times when the economy was growing," Luke Pardue, the principal economist at the human-resources-software company Gusto, said. "But we saw in 2020 women taking their economic future into their own hands and demonstrating that business ownership can be for everyone at all times."
Women made up 49% of new business owners in 2020 and 2021, compared with 27% in 2019, according to Pardue.
To understand what fuels this momentum, Insider spoke with three women who started businesses during the pandemic, are also mothers and caretakers, and could no longer see their futures in working for someone else.