Women over 50 outperform in business. Why are they still overlooked?

When Meryl Rosenthal and her cofounder started a human capital and workplace transformation consultancy in 2005, she was 41 years old. Nine years later, her cofounder left for personal reasons, rendering Rosenthal—by then age 50—a so-called solopreneur. 

Being a woman of that age and running a business on her own certainly came with challenges. One, she says, was that younger HR and business leaders tended to assume she didn’t have the necessary expertise because her background had not squarely been in HR. Another was a preconception that she—as an older woman—didn’t understand technology as well as her younger peers.

None of these things daunted Rosenthal, though. “​​What helped me move forward was the combination of everything that had come before: work ethic, business experience, perspective, adaptability, and confidence. I was able to step fully into my own voice,” she says. “I was able to trust my judgment, and reshape the business around my strengths.” She adds that startup founders who succeed with their ventures often do so because they’re able to “borrow and apply skills from prior roles in entrepreneurial ways.” 

And that, she says, “is especially true for many women over 50.” 

Her business has thrived. It’s been going for over two decades. Rosenthal is about to turn 62.

According to Census data, around 40% of all businesses in the U.S. were owned by women last year, a growing number that’s testament to changing gender norms. Women are also starting more companies than ever before—almost half, according to some research. 

But for female founders and business owners who are over 50, progress has come with a catch. Many report a double bind: bias tied not just to gender, but to age, too. That bias shows up most starkly in areas like funding. 

“You have to prove yourself a lot more as a woman, and an older woman,” says Julie Wing, a 65-year-old serial entrepreneur and aviation business owner. “Men don’t have to prove themselves.”

What makes this double bind particularly galling is that, over the last few years, a growing body of research suggests that it is precisely this group of founders that may be among the most overlooked sources of entrepreneurial growth.

One MIT study found that older business founders are much more likely to be successful than younger ones, not least because “prior experience in [a] specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success.”

Research from Boston Consulting Group, meanwhile, shows that startups founded and cofounded by women performed better than those founded by men, generating, on average, 10% more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period. Perhaps even more strikingly, that research established that for every dollar of funding, the women-founded startups generated 78 cents, while male-founded startups generated less than half that—just 31 cents. 

In other words, overlooking founders who fall into both the disadvantaged age and gender categories could be leaving an indeterminable amount of economic value on the table.

The Bias Trap

While data on the particular experience of female founders over the age of 50 is scant, many studies show that both age and gender remain a barrier when starting a business and raising money.  

Research published last year shows that of the $289 billion of venture capital deployed in 2024, a mere 2.3% went to female-only founding teams, and just 14.1% went to mixed-gender founding teams. Academics in Germany and Austria last year published their results of a survey of 361 venture capitalists around the world, and found that more than a quarter of respondents said they believed women’s participation in founding teams to be overrated, that 15.3% said they considered women to be poor entrepreneurs, and 11.9% admitted they would not invest in women-led ventures. 

When it comes to age, the research is just as damning. One academic study published last year found a clear negative correlation between a founder’s age and the amount of money that person was able to raise: It became harder as founders got older.

Shubhi Rao, a veteran corporate executive who, at the age of 54, recently founded an AI company, explains that both of these effects can, at least in part, be chalked up to familiarity bias—a tendency to favor and invest in a familiar or known option, even if, objectively, an unfamiliar option might be better. This can be particularly powerful when things are uncertain. And the world of startups is deeply uncertain. 

“There are no audited financials, no operating history, no comparables in the traditional sense. The product is unproven, the market is contested, and the team has almost certainly never done this specific thing before,” she says. Against this backdrop, decisions are frequently made on the basis of mental shortcuts, and what’s been done successfully in the past. 

“When you cannot underwrite the future,” she says, “you study the past.”

Thin Historical Record

The problem is that the past is not, as Rao puts it,  “a neutral record.” Instead, it has been dominated by company founders who are young men—meaning that, by definition, successful founders are young men, too. So when someone who doesn’t fit that description enters the space, bias can kick in strongly. 

“Consider a woman in her mid-forties starting a company,” says Rao. “The question the system finds itself asking is not whether she is capable. It is whether there is anything to compare her to, whether the mental model [of her being a successful founder] holds, whether the pattern that we’ve so far seen when it comes to successful founders applies,” she adds. “And when you start layering variables, age and gender and sector and business model and background, the historical record thins out very quickly.”

Julie Wing, the aviation executive, has seen this play out in everyday interactions. Of prospective customers or, indeed, potential funders, she says that they “naturally assume my male colleague is going to know more than me—even when I’m the sole owner of the business.”

Sarah Clayton, a 58-year-old owner of a business-to-business conference  company, says that women are also still more likely to be expected to manage children and other family responsibilities, something that’s corroborated by reams of research. This phenomenon also feeds into bias and preconceptions about their commitment and competence, and about what makes an ideal business leader.

Rao says that for some combinations of founder characteristics, there is almost no prior example of somebody who’s done it before. For a woman of color, of a particular age and in a particular industry, for example, there might be no one else like her who’s made a name for herself. “Not because these founders have not existed,” she adds, “but because they were not the ones who got funded, and so they never made it into the picture in the first place.” 

The Experience Dividend 

Funders, and especially venture capital funders, are inherently focused on recognizing untapped value: finding the founder, the idea, or the company that no one else has spotted. And some funders actually are starting to appreciate that those opportunities might well be at an intersection of age and gender that’s traditionally not been as visible in the startup world.

In a 2024 interview with Institutional Investor magazine, Katerina Stroponiati, a longtime investor, said that the venture capital world had for years “glorified youth.” “Imagine all this experience [older founders have], all this wisdom and all these years,” she added.

Clayton says that the “list is long” of qualities that older women in business bring to the table: “They have high pain tolerance, they’re used to multitasking, used to preempting things happening while also just getting things done,” she says. “They also have high emotional intelligence and collaboration skills and they often lack ego,” she adds.

Lauren Silva Laughlin, a 46-year-old founder of a men’s health startup that aims to create transparency around the market for sperm donorship, says that, in some cases, those structural disadvantages can actually force founders to build more disciplined businesses. 

“If it’s harder for me to raise money, then I don’t have the luxury of being able to afford to waste a million dollars in the first 12 months, or $5 million in the first two years,” she explains. “I have to be super thoughtful about what I’m doing and hyper-focused on it being a profitable company.” 

She also says that as an older founder, some of the barriers she faces embolden her, and make her more determined to succeed. “If I was in my twenties, some of what I encounter would piss me off,” she says. “But in my forties, I’m like—you do what you have to do to be successful.”

Asked whether she thinks conditions are improving for women business owners and founders, Julie Wing, the aviation business owner, says that despite all of the challenges and headwinds that still exist, she’s optimistic.

“Women are agile and resilient and determined, and the more we normalize women of all ages starting and leading businesses, the more we’re encouraging women to take that leap of faith—to pursue their dream of doing something on their own,” she says. 

She also thinks that women are becoming more willing and enthusiastic to go against gender norms and to prove themselves: “In some ways, I’d like to be alive in a hundred years’ time,” she says. “I think women might’ve conquered the world.”