Women Entrepreneurs Deserve Better: The Mental Cost of Inequality

Entrepreneurship is often painted as liberation promising freedom, autonomy, and self-determination. It gives you goose bumps when you read it. Yet for many women, especially those stepping into business ownership after years in traditional workplaces, it’s not freedom they meet first. It’s the same familiar barrier, the gender pay gap, just disguised in new clothes.

We like to believe that becoming your own boss frees you from wage inequality. But research, and lived experience, tell a different story. The pay disparity between men and women doesn’t disappear when women become entrepreneurs, it multiplies exponentially.

From Pay Gap to Profit Gap

In employment, the wage gap means women often earn 80 cents for every dollar a male counterpart makes. In entrepreneurship, that divide deepens. Female-owned businesses statistically generate less revenue, attract less investment, and face more scrutiny from lenders and investors.

Even though studies show that women run startups (which there are less of) deliver a greater return per dollar invested compared to those founded by men—$0.78 for women versus $0.31 for men https://www.bcg.com/publications/2018/why-women-owned-startups-are-better-betAccording to the pay equity office of Ontario reported back in 2023 that women entrepreneurs on average make 58% less than their male counterparts. WTF!!!

But why do you ask? Because structural bias doesn’t just disappear when you register a business and decide to do things on your own terms. You are haunted by this reality at every entrepreneurial corner – in funding, visibility, credibility, and even pricing confidence.

Women often undervalue their own work (because we’ve been taught to), underprice their services (because the market expects us to), and overdeliver (because we feel we must).

It’s not a lack of skill or ambition. It’s the cumulative effect (or intersectionality) of established systems adding up, and the math is not pretty and neither are the subsequent effects on entrepreneurial mental health.

The Hidden Costs: Second Shifts, Third Shifts, and the Beauty Tax

As if the reality of the financial disparity didn’t slap you across the face, women entrepreneurs face emotional and physical labour that men are rarely expected to carry. Because unlike when men succeed there at home responsibilities are lessened, delegated and understood. A successful woman’s personal life responsibilities don’t change, meaning her success doesn’t buy her freedom; it actually weighs her down even more. 

After running their businesses, many women clock in for a second shift at home where they continue to care for children, parents, or partners. And then a third shift tending to their emotional ecosystem, holding everyone else together.

Throw in the “beauty tax”; the unspoken but very real pressure to maintain a polished, professional, and “approachable” appearance,and the emotional exhaustion compounds. Studies show women spend more time, energy, and money maintaining an image that society demands, but rarely rewards. The cost isn’t just financial. It’s psychological. It’s spiritual. It can chip away at confidence, clarity and a sense of inner self worth that fuels creativity and innovation; the currency that entrepreneurship demands most.

The Emotional and Mental Health Toll 

The entrepreneurial journey is already emotionally taxing. Your days are  full of uncertainty, rejection, and risk. For women, the stakes are higher. They are often juggling invisible expectations that society places squarely on their shoulders:
Be successful, but not intimidating.
Be nurturing, but never distracted.
Be confident, but not “too much.”
And whatever you do — don’t fail.

This double bind creates an impossible standard that leads to chronic stress, guilt, imposter syndrome, and burnout. And when women delay motherhood, are childless either by choice or not – and focus on their businesses — they face yet another cultural judgment: the narrative that they’re “choosing work over love,” as if the two were ever meant to compete.

It’s no wonder that women entrepreneurs experience higher rates of depression and anxiety than their male counterparts. They are not only building businesses; they are carrying generations of societal expectation on their backs.

Redefining Success and Self-Care

The truth is, entrepreneurship for women isn’t just a business journey, it’s a spiritual one. It demands healing generational stories of sacrifice, scarcity, and silence.

Therapy, mentorship,peer support and community aren’t luxuries in this space, they’re really  lifelines. They give female entrepreneurs the space to acknowledge their unique realities as business owners, to process the inequities, name the emotional labour, and create boundaries that protect both their business and their wellbeing.

To build sustainable success, women must also build and continually reinforce emotional infrastructure that is rooted in grace, not grind.

Through a deep support system and the prioritization of mental wellness as a marker of success, we are able to build spaces where women entrepreneurs don’t have to choose between being seen and being supported and their worth wasn’t tied to aesthetics or maternal status. Therapy, whether 1-1 or peer support should not be an afterthought of the entrepreneurial journey, but part of the foundation and ongoing sustainability.

Carolina Gutiérrez is a Registered Social Service Worker and Hypnotherapist with over 20+ years of clinical experience. She is a member in good standing with the College of Social Workers & Social Service Workers of Ontario. Her practice focus areas are entrepreneurship, infertility, childhood sexual abuse, childhood trauma/neglect, life transition and spiritual exploration. Carolina approach’s mental wellness from a holistic perspective, incorporating her professional training, spirituality and somatic work through the lens of her Ancestral Wisdom practices of Curanderismo. Therapywithcarolina.ca is a Downtown Brampton, Ontario based Therapy and Counselling practice offering in person, virtual, walk & talk sessions and group programs for clients both in Ontario and Internationally.

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