Are All Businesses Created Equal?
A century after suffrage, the fight for equal standing has moved from the ballot box to the balance sheet.
A quick note: today's post is a little different from our usual blog posts. We’re joined by our friend and frequent collaborator, Juliet Pierre-Antoine, Founder + Chief Communications Officer at Connection Point, for a joint piece reflecting on Women's Equality Day—what it means, how far we've come, and what else we need to do.
Today, August 26, we mark Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote in 1920. It’s tempting to treat that date as a finish line. It wasn’t. It was the opening argument in a longer case: that all women deserve full standing as citizens, not just at the ballot box, but in all aspects of personal, professional, and daily life, including the ones that decide whether a small business survives.
We are both a founder and a co-founder, respectively. Between us, we’ve weathered a recession, anxiety-riddled rollercoasters over pitches, and dealt with endless rejections from investors. We’ve each learned the same lesson: the biggest obstacles to women building and keeping businesses open aren’t about ambition, effort, or skill. They’re written into law, or left out of it. Over 100 years later, a woman’s biggest obstacle is still access.
Follow the money. Women started nearly half of all new U.S. businesses last year, yet women-led companies still receive a sliver of available venture capital and business credit. When women do get loans, they often face higher interest rates and steeper collateral requirements than men with similar businesses. The gap is starkest for women of color: research shows they receive less than 2% of venture-capital funding, and about 61% of Black women entrepreneurs self-fund, taking on more debt. That’s worth naming—August is also National Black Business Month.
This isn’t new. For decades, women couldn’t get a business loan or credit card in their own name without a husband or father cosigning—until 1974, with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, over fifty years after suffrage. The right to vote didn’t come with the right to be judged creditworthy on your own merits. We’re still shrinking that gap.
Then there’s the paperwork. Every founder deals with licensing, permits, and compliance costs. For a solo consultant or small business, those costs land differently than for a company with a full legal department. A flat fee or fixed filing requirement isn’t neutral; it’s regressive, hitting the smallest operations hardest. Small operations are often women-owned: most women-owned businesses are sole proprietorships with no employees, least equipped to absorb a fixed regulatory cost. Even those with small teams aren’t exempt from hardship.
None of this requires charity or a lower bar. It requires the same thing suffrage required: a change in what the law assumes about who it serves. Lending standards that don’t quietly penalize businesses without collateral to spare. Licensing and compliance structures scaled to the size of the business, not a one-size-fits-all fee sheet ultimately built to serve corporations.
We didn’t get into consulting to make a political point. We got into it because we like building things we care about and helping other people build things too. But you can’t spend years watching capable, hardworking women hit the same walls—the same loan officer’s hesitation, the same fee that doesn’t scale—without noticing that the walls are made of policy, not fate.
Women’s Equality Day asks us to look back at 1920 and be grateful. It should also ask us to look at 2026 and be honest: the amendment changed who gets to vote on the laws. It’s past time the laws changed to reflect who’s actually building this economy.