Friday, August 8, 2025

The return of the female founder sets off a lively debate

In today’s edition: Meta collected data from a period-tracking app, sexual harassment is a big problem for Uber, and everyone wants to talk about the return of the female founder.

– She’s back. Earlier this week, I wrote about the resurgence of the 2010 female founder—a group of founders who lost control of their companies in 2020 are now coming back and trying again. I was happy to see it. People deserve a second chance, and five years later it seems time for us to give these founders one.

It seems as if this was a topic people have been searching for the right moment to talk about, because the response was overwhelming. In my inbox, texts, on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more I heard from founders who said they’d been waiting for a story like this. I heard from founders who never came close to employee revolts or media “takedowns” themselves but nevertheless said they’d shrunk themselves in response to fears of bad media coverage over the past few years. Some were only now reckoning with the impact that had on their companies. Other business leaders—like Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky, who started last year’s “founder mode” debate—shared the story too.

Others, of course, disagreed and said that they were not happy to see these founders come back—they didn’t trust that things would be different this time around or didn’t want to forgive the management mistakes, the impact those mistakes had on women of color in their workforces, or other problems. There was a lively debate about the topic in the chat for the Substack newsletter Feed Me and in the chat for the newsletter from Sophia Amoruso herself, who coined the term “girlboss.”

My former Fortune colleague Beth Kowitt, now at Bloomberg, published her own view on this trend on the same day. We did not coordinate (I promise) but both had similar feelings on what Beth called the “revenge of the girlbosses.” This week it was Ty Haney, Audrey Gelman, Yael Aflalo, and Steph Korey, but it’s clear the real impact is bigger than this handful of women. Tell me, what do you think of this female founder 3.0 era? Are things really different now? Send me a note at the email address below!

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

- Privacy n0-no. A jury found that Meta illegally collected user data from Flo, the period-tracking app. The "eavesdropping" on in-app communications violated California's Invasion of Privacy Act. Meta objected to the verdict and intends to appeal. The Verge

- Bad BLS news. Besides getting the commissioner fired by Trump, this month's jobs report revealed other news: 212,000 women over 20 have left the workforce since January. (During that time, 44,000 men entered the workforce.) While women left the workforce in droves in the early pandemic, workforce participation had soared since 2022. Meanwhile, workplace flexibility has declined. Time

- Danger zone. Uber received a report of sexual assault or misconduct almost every eight minutes between 2017 and 2022, according to the New York Times. While Uber studied the problem and developed tools that helped, it delayed requiring drivers to adopt them, the Times reported. An internal document on safety standards said that Uber's goal was not to "be the police" but to "set the tolerable risk level for our operations." Uber's head of safety for the Americas said that "there is no ‘tolerable’ level of sexual assault" and that 75% of incidents reported were less serious—like a comment about someone's appearance, rather than assault. New York Times

- Speak up. The pendulum is swinging on corporate activism, again. After a long period in which people got sick of companies taking stances on social issues, now 51% of U.S. adults say they believe companies should take public stances on current issues. Free speech, climate change, mental health, and DEI are the top four topics people want businesses to respond to. Axios