– Another glass ceiling. While 11% of the Fortune 500 is now led by female CEOs, there’s another barrier that has proven near-impossible to break for women: founding and scaling a company to the list of America’s largest businesses by revenue.
Only one female founder-CEO in the 70-year history of the Fortune 500 has ever started and led a company that makes the list. Meanwhile, 24 male founder-CEOs run Fortune 500 giants—from Mark Zuckerberg at Meta to Jensen Huang at Nvidia.
The only woman ever to run a Fortune 500 company she founded was Marion Sandler. She was the cofounder of mortgage lender Golden West Financial, which she led with her husband and co-CEO Herb Sandler for more than four decades. She was one of the first two women CEOs on the Fortune 500 in 1997 and one of the longest-serving women CEOs on the list ever.
Sandler created one of the largest savings and loan firms in the country with $124 billion in assets and 285 savings branches across the United States at its peak. The firm was praised as one of the best-run lenders in the country and became a pioneer of its industry, creating the option-adjustable rate mortgage which allowed borrowers to temporarily make small loan repayments not covering interest. While Sandler was often described as the marketing and consumer brain behind the business, her business and finance accomplishments were groundbreaking.
Having earned an MBA from New York University in 1958, Sandler was one of the first women to hold a professional finance job on Wall Street and the first woman executive hired at Dominick & Dominick, a brokerage and investment-banking firm. She went on to work for Oppenheimer and Company as a senior analyst, as well as an advisor to institutional investors, and consult for major business publications.
Golden West last appeared on the Fortune 500 in 2005, and since then, no other woman founder-CEO has joined Sandler in the feat. Several female founders have built their companies into unicorns valued at more than $1 billion—but to reach the size of a Fortune 500 business, where the smallest company this year had $7.4 billion in revenue, is another level. Female-founded companies in 2024, according to Pitchbook, received just 20% of funding and 25% of total VC deals. For female-founded companies without male cofounders, the number drops to 1% of funding and 6% of all deals.
It’s not simply the lack of a male cofounder that makes acquiring funding and gaining the trust of investors more difficult for women founders. Gendered notions around leadership and unconscious bias also fuel this cycle. Research from Yale University demonstrated that women receive 22% less funding from investors who have experienced a “failure” by another woman-led startup in the past five years. Ultimately, without equal access to capital, women founders are seldom able to scale their businesses to the same size as their male counterparts.
Even for companies that reach an IPO (another milestone that for decades was out of reach for female founders), it’s doubly hard for founders to stay on as CEOs afterwards. A 2018 study from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance reported that 60% of founders are swapped out post-IPO, and of those who stay, only half remain in the role beyond three years unless they hold strong voting control.
Two decades have passed since a woman founder-CEO has graced the Fortune 500—and in all likelihood, it will be years longer before another one does. But who might one day? Canva cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins has ambitions to build a true tech giant that competes with Microsoft and Google. While Canva has not yet gone public, it’s already almost halfway to the Fortune 500’s revenue benchmark—with $3 billion in sales. (And is the highest-valued startup both founded and led by a woman.) Reply to this email to send us your thoughts on who else might break this barrier one day.
Lily Mae Lazarus
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Setting things straight. The Supreme Court sided with a straight woman in her “reverse discrimination” lawsuit, in which she claimed that her gay boss at Ohio’s Department of Youth Services passed her over for a promotion in favor of a gay woman. This decision could make it easier for others to win similar lawsuits. CNN
- Going once, going twice. Genetic-testing company 23andMe is holding a second auction. The starting price: $305 million, which is how much former CEO Anne Wojcicki’s nonprofit TTAM Research Institute offered. Regeneron, the biotech previously set to acquire the company, will need to bid $315 million if it’s still interested. Wall Street Journal
- Rate reductions. European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said the bank has “nearly concluded” its rate-cutting cycle, after reducing interest rates from 2.25% to 2%. Lagarde also said that the Eurozone would be well-positioned “to navigate the uncertain conditions,” as trade tensions continue between the U.S. and E.U. Financial Times
- Tech center cuts. Jane Fraser’s Citigroup is eliminating 3,500 jobs at its technology centers in China as part of its efforts to streamline global tech operations and its broader plan to cut 10% of its workforce. CNBC
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Citymark Capital, a real estate-focused capital markets platform, named Beth Zayicek COO. Most recently, she was COO for Invesco Real Estate.
MindBridge, a financial decision intelligence platform, appointed Rachel Kirkham as CTO. She was most recently the company’s SVP, AI and product.
Papa John’s named Caroline Miller Oyler chief administrative officer. She was previously the company’s chief legal and risk officer and will continue being corporate secretary.
Hotel group Lark appointed Amber Asher to its board of directors. Asher was CEO of Standard International.
Cracker company Firehook appointed Becca Millstein to its board of directors. She is CEO and cofounder of Fishwife.
ON MY RADAR
Meet the 35-year-old tech exec helping chart DoorDash’s future—after a rapid rise to become one of Amazon’s youngest female VPs ever Fortune
Why Bumble and Tinder are suddenly scrambling to keep up with Hinge Fast Company
The ‘summer body’ is over. Something worse is taking its place Vox
PARTING WORDS
“When we say ‘I quit’, it’s like, ‘I quit the things that don’t serve me.’ And it’s really amazing, ’cause quitting is a new beginning.”
— Musician Alana Haim on her band Haim’s new album, I Quit
