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By Taylor Smith, Founder and CEO of The Power Table

Taylor is a four-time founder, international keynote speaker, and personal brand strategist. Before she built businesses, she was a researcher.

Power Table LIVE had just ended. For two days I had been in a room with hundreds of women who run real businesses. I heard how they actually make their money, who they call when they need a yes, and what it costs them to keep going. The room was loud, specific, and completely honest.

Then I opened LinkedIn.

I scrolled through the business news the way you do when your brain is full and you want something easy. Funding rounds. Unicorn lists. A ranking of the most influential founders. A think piece about what "women in business" need right now.

None of it matched the room I had just left. Not the stories. Not the connections. Not the business models. It was like reading a weather report for a city I had never been to.

That gap is why we built the Female Founder Economy Survey. It is the first research study we know of built specifically around the online female founder. It is open now through October 15, and I need you in it.

In this article, I'm sharing what the current data misses about women like us, the pattern I think is hiding underneath it, and four questions to answer about your own business today. They are the same questions the survey asks.

Meet the Woman Behind the Study, Taylor Smith

Taylor Smith is the founder and CEO of The Power Table, the women's entrepreneurship community behind The Power Table LIVE conference, The Power Table Mastermind, and The Power Table Podcast. She is a four-time founder and an international keynote speaker who helps women entrepreneurs become more visible, respected, and in demand.

Before she ever launched a business, Taylor trained in anthropology, earning both a BA and an MA, and spent years in academic research running qualitative surveys and ethnographic fieldwork. That training shapes how she reads her own industry. She wants to know why women build businesses the way they do, not just how much they make.

Why this matters right now

Most of what gets published about women in business describes a woman most of us have never been.

The number you hear on every panel is about venture capital. Startups founded only by women took roughly 2% of U.S. venture funding in 2024, according to PitchBook data compiled by Female Founders Fund. That number is real and it matters. It also describes almost no one reading this, because most of us never raised a dollar of outside money and never planned to.

Here is the woman the headlines skip. Women own 12.9 million businesses with no employees in the U.S., and together those businesses bring in $423.1 billion a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. QuickBooks research found that 42% of women entrepreneurs run solo, more than double the rate for men.

Nobody is asking those women what they earn, what they pay themselves, where their best clients came from, or what it costs them to stay in business. So we are.

What I think is happening

Some of the most successful online women founders are hiding in plain sight.

They are building stable, diversified businesses on intellectual property, private relationships, and several revenue streams at once, even when their full economic success is not visible online. Their audiences are modest. Their revenue is not. Their biggest opportunities came from a text message, not a viral post.

Meanwhile, the loudest accounts set the benchmark for everyone else. Women measure themselves against follower counts and launch screenshots that were never the full picture. Then they burn out chasing a number that was never the real scoreboard.

Ask AI who the top founders are

A study published this spring by Ranking Atlas ran 2,520 queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, asking each one to name the top experts, analysts, and voices in tech. It collected 10,711 name mentions. Among the names the models offered up as founders and CEOs, 9.8% were women.

One in ten, in an industry that is 28% women. Roughly a third of our actual share.

The only other study I can find asked chatbots to recommend eye doctors in the 20 largest U.S. cities. Women are 27.2% of practicing ophthalmologists. Bing named a woman 1.61% of the time. Google's Bard named one 8% of the time.

Then the tech study did one more thing. It ran a control question: who are the most important women in this field?

That query came back 96.5% women.

The models know exactly who we are. They just don't file us under "founder" unless someone asks for women by name. That is hiding in plain sight, built into the tools your next client uses to find help.

And the fix is not more posting. In that same study, Perplexity, the only model searching the live web, named the fewest women of all four. The internet is feeding these tools a founder who doesn't look like us. Better data about who we actually are is how that changes.

Action Step: Ask ChatGPT or Claude who the top experts are in your niche. Note whether you're named, and count how many women are.

Advanced Tip: Ask again with different wording, like "who are the leading voices" or "who should I follow." In the tech study, the share of women named swung from 11.8% to 27.8% on phrasing alone.

That's my hypothesis, and the AI numbers are one more reason to test it. A hypothesis needs data. Here is what the survey measures, and how you can start measuring it in your own business right now.

Count the income streams nobody sees

Most business content treats revenue as one number. For a lot of online founders, it's three or four separate engines running at once.

Think about the women you know who coach, but also license a method, earn book royalties, get paid to speak, or own a rental property that quietly covers the mortgage. None of that shows up in a feed or in the research.

The survey asks which income sources bring in at least 10% of your revenue. That threshold does two jobs. It filters out the side projects that don't move anything, and the number of boxes you check becomes a measure of how diversified your business actually is.

Action Step: Write down every income source that brings in 10% or more of your annual revenue. Count them.

Advanced Tip: Circle the ones built on something you own, like a method, a book, a certification, or a body of work. Those are the streams that keep paying when you step away, and they are the ones investors and journalists never ask about.

Trace your best opportunity back to its source

Ask a room of women founders where their best opportunity of the year came from and listen to the answers. You'll hear a referral from a past client, a friend who made an introduction, a conversation over dinner, a group chat.

Now look at where most of us spend our marketing hours. Posting. Filming. Optimizing.

Event organizers see a version of this gap too. In Bizzabo's 2026 research, 78% of organizers called in-person events their organization's strongest marketing channel, while only 15% rated their networking as very effective. Being in the room clearly works. What happens once you're in it is less certain.

I think the rooms that work for women are smaller and more private than anyone is measuring. The survey asks where your single most valuable opportunity originated so we can finally see the pattern instead of guessing at it.

Action Step: List the three best opportunities you landed in the last twelve months. For each one, write down exactly where it came from: a post, a referral, a room, a relationship.

Advanced Tip: If the answer is mostly relationships, look at your calendar. Count how many hours last week went to content and how many went to the people who actually send you business. That ratio says a lot about where your next year comes from.

Stop using audience size as the scoreboard

This is the part of the study I care about most.

The survey asks for two numbers: the size of your email list and the size of your largest social following. Then we set those numbers next to revenue.

If I'm right, we'll find women running strong, profitable businesses with audiences that would make a growth marketer shrug. We'll also find large audiences attached to businesses that are struggling more than they let on. Both are true in my community right now. What we don't have is the data to prove it at scale.

Proving it changes how brands choose partners, how organizers choose speakers, and how you judge your own progress on a Tuesday afternoon.

Action Step: Write your email list size and your largest following next to your revenue from the last twelve months. Look at them side by side.

Advanced Tip: Ask yourself honestly which of those three numbers you talk about most in public. Then ask which one pays your bills.

Tell the truth about what it costs

The study includes a section we call The Honest Experience. It asks about burnout, about caregiving, and about how your business is designed around the rest of your life.

Women who leave the workforce early to care for an aging parent lose an estimated $324,044 in wages, Social Security, and pension income over a lifetime, according to MetLife's study of working caregivers. That number tracks what women lose when they step away from a job. It says nothing about the woman who stepped away and built her own company around the people she takes care of.

She is in our community by the thousands. We have almost no data on her.

Action Step: Write one sentence describing how your caregiving responsibilities shape how your business is built, whether that's your hours, your offers, or how much you travel.

Advanced Tip: If your business was designed around your life, name the design choices out loud. Those choices are a strategy, and treating them like a compromise costs you in how you price and position yourself.

Why a researcher is asking these questions

Before I was a founder, I spent years in academic research. The work was sitting with people, asking better questions than the ones printed on the form, and finding the pattern underneath what they said out loud.

Then I built four companies and watched the same thing happen over and over. The numbers women share in public rarely match the numbers on their bank statements, in both directions.

This survey is where those two careers meet. We are running it with DEN Insights, an independent research firm that is handling the survey build, data collection, and analysis. Your answers are anonymous and reported only in aggregate. They are never attached to your name, your business, or your email address.

Why we need 1,000 women

A thousand responses is the difference between an interesting blog post and a study a journalist will cite.

At that size, we can cut the data by revenue, business model, audience size, and caregiving load and still have findings we can defend in every cut. Below it, every result comes with an asterisk, and the people who benefit from the current story get to keep telling it.

We are taking these findings to national business press, to stages, and to the brands and sponsors who make decisions about our industry without ever asking us. I want to walk into those conversations with a thousand women behind every number.

I also want something quieter. I want you to open the report in January and see yourself in it. Maybe for the first time, you'll know where you actually stand against women building businesses like yours.

What you get for your time

When the survey closes, you can opt in to receive the full report, The State of the Online Female Founder, the day it publishes in January. Not a summary. The whole thing.

You'll also get a guide to using the findings in your own business. That covers where you sit against women in your revenue range, what the data says about pricing, and which rooms produce real work versus nice photos.

Opting in is separate from the survey itself, so your answers stay anonymous either way.

Where to start

The survey is 30 questions and takes less than five minutes. It asks what your business made and what you paid yourself. I would rather you close the tab than round up. The entire value of this study is that it is true.

Before you open it, sit with these four questions for a minute:

• How many income streams bring in 10% or more of my revenue, and which of them do I own?
• Where did my best opportunity this year actually come from?
• Which number do I talk about most in public, and which one pays my bills?
• How is my business built around the rest of my life, and have I ever called that a strategy?

Then take the survey at thepowertable.co/survey. It closes October 15.

When you're done, send it to one woman you know who would have something to say. The bigger the sample, the harder the findings are to argue with.

The most successful women in our industry may never show up in a headline. This is how we count them anyway.

About the Author, Taylor Smith

Taylor Smith is the founder and CEO of The Power Table, a women's entrepreneurship community, podcast, and live conference brand. A four-time founder, international keynote speaker, and personal brand strategist, she helps women entrepreneurs become more visible, respected, and in demand. Before entrepreneurship, she worked in academic research, running qualitative surveys and ethnographic studies, and she brings that lens to understanding why women build businesses the way they do. Find her on Instagram @thepowertable.co or listen to The Power Table Podcast.

Sources: Female Founders Fund, "Ten Years of Funding for Female Founders" (March 2026), citing PitchBook data; Founder Reports, "Female Entrepreneur Statistics: What the Numbers Reveal" (April 2026), citing U.S. Census Bureau data; Under30CEO, "Solopreneur Boom: 29.8M Solo Owners, $1.7T in Sales" (August 2026), citing QuickBooks research; Bizzabo, "The Events Industry's Top Marketing Statistics, Trends, and Benchmarks for 2026" (March 2026); Family Caregiver Alliance, "Caregiver Statistics: Work and Caregiving" (December 2022), citing The MetLife Study of Working Caregivers; Ranking Atlas, "One Woman for Every Ten: How AI Names the Experts in Tech" (April 2026); Cureus, "Bias and Inaccuracy in AI Chatbot Ophthalmologist Recommendations" (September 2023).

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