Every week, I speak with women who have spent years becoming experts in their field. And over the last year, I've noticed a trend in how they're choosing to spend their time going forward.

More and more, the women I know are not chasing the next level-up on the corporate ladder. Many of them are in their 40s or 50s. They had the title, the team, the comp package, and they're leaving all of that behind.

When I ask them why, almost every single one says some version of the same thing: I wanted to own my time, and I'm tired of working for terrible bosses that will lay me off without a second thought.

52% of all solopreneurs in the U.S. are now women. Nearly half of all women entrepreneurs operate without a single employee, more than twice the rate of men at 19%. In 2019, women started 29% of new businesses. By 2024, that number was 49%.

Something structural is shifting in how women choose to work.

Our most finite resource is time.

Nearly three-quarters of women who started a business in 2024 said the number one driver was controlling their own schedule. The top motivation, across hundreds of thousands of women, was time. Their highest priority was no longer a market opportunity.

I've written previously about the She-cession. Between January and August of 2025 alone, 455,000 women exited the U.S. workforce. Women leaders are leaving their companies at the highest rate ever recorded. Yes, in some ways it's alarming, but it's also an opportunity for the women that seize the moment. A growing number of women stopped building their lives around a system that was never designed for them.

And here's my favorite part. The fastest-growing group of new entrepreneurs in the U.S. is women over 50. The women walking out are not the ones who couldn't cut it. They're the most senior, the most experienced, the ones who spent decades earning expertise they now own outright. They're leaving the stagnating corporate world behind and building on their own terms.

The institutions that trained them are watching their best people walk out the door.

AI has changed things.

We're living in an age when going solo has a lower barrier to entry than ever before.

Going solo used to mean real trade-offs. Slower growth, no one to delegate to, and overhead that ate every margin you made. That has changed fast. AI is now fundamentally reshaping what one person can build, and women are among the fastest to recognize it.

Tasks that used to require a full team can now be handled by a single founder with the right tools. The barrier to operating like a much larger company has collapsed.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicted that the first billion-dollar company run by a single person could emerge in 2026. The solopreneur economy already contributes $1.7 trillion to U.S. GDP. And solo operators are increasingly positioned to rival mid-sized companies.

The old trade-off was scale or freedom. AI is collapsing it.

It’s a calculated leap of faith.

Solopreneurs are making six figures, and the model is working, but there are always tradeoffs.

Building lean means the margin for error is thinner. Revenue compounds more slowly. There's no one else in the building when things go sideways, and most outside investors still prioritize businesses with payroll.

But every woman I've talked to who has done this tells me the same thing. She stopped measuring success the way she used to. She's measuring it in school pickups she didn't have to reschedule, in clients she actually likes, and in the particular relief of not managing someone else's ego on a Sunday night.

That is a different deal than the one corporate was offering. For a lot of women, myself included, it’s a better one.

So, what does this mean for you?

If you're thinking about making this move, the floor you need is simpler than you think. A skill someone will pay for and one client lined up before you leave. AI handles the overhead that used to make going solo impractical. Most women at this crossroads already have something worth selling and just haven't charged for it yet.

If you're building for women, your buyer is increasingly a business owner and not an employee. She controls her own spending, makes her own decisions, and her economic power is growing faster than most industries have figured out.

If you're running a team, the women who leave tend to be your most experienced, most capable, most tenured people, and when they go, they take years of institutional knowledge with them. If they're walking, that is worth understanding before you hand them an exit survey.

Hit reply and tell me: are you thinking about making this move? Or have you already done it? I read every single response.

Jenny

P.S. If this hit home, forward it to a woman you know who is stuck in a job that stopped serving her.

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