Aisha | The Business Witch
Aisha is an intuitive business strategist, mentor, and the creator of The Business Witch Grimoire. After a successful 20-year career as a corporate HR leader, where she specialized in recruitment strategy, scaled teams, and led massive talent acquisitions, she stepped out of the corporate box to blend practical executive strategy with energetic alignment.
Affectionately known as The Business Witch, Aisha teaches ancient magic, ritual, and modern business frameworks as essential tools for entrepreneurs looking to build wealth, break stagnant paradigms, and achieve sustainable success. Her work heavily incorporates elemental magic, mindset alignment, and intuitive practices like Tarot to help leaders move through resistance, find their voice, and create a secure, stable life doing work they love.
Key Areas of Focus
Corporate Meets Culinary & Kitchen Magic: Merging two decades of high-level HR leadership with grounded, real-world execution.
Elemental Frameworks: Utilizing Air and Earth elemental magic to help clients break old patterns, steady their minds, and stay rooted during seasons of massive growth.
Intuitive Guidance: Incorporating Tarot, spirit guide alignment, and energetic boundary-setting (like cord-cutting) into modern career and business strategy.
TALKING POINTS: Women in Business
A briefing on representation, entrepreneurship, pay, and the business case with current U.S. data.
1. Opening Message
Women are a driving force in the U.S. economy, leading record numbers of major companies, launching nearly half of all new businesses, and generating trillions in revenue. Yet progress toward parity remains slow and, on several fronts, has recently stalled or reversed. The story to tell is one of real momentum alongside persistent, structural gaps.
• Representation at the top is at record highs but still around one in ten (Hinchliffe, 2025).
• Women start businesses faster than ever but capture a fraction of growth capital (Wells Fargo, 2025; Founders Forum Group, 2025).
• The business case for gender-diverse leadership keeps getting stronger (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
2. Leadership & Representation
Key numbers
55 (11%) Fortune 500 companies led by a woman CEO — a record high, up from 52 in 2024 (Hinchliffe, 2025)
~33–35% Share of S&P 500 board directors who are women — slipped ~1 pt from the prior year (Altrata, 2025)
#18 Highest-ranked Fortune 500 company run by a woman: GM, No. 18, CEO Mary Barra (Hinchliffe, 2025)
36% Share of newly elected women directors, down from 43% in 2022 (Altrata, 2025)
The 2025 figure of 55 women CEOs is the most ever genuine progress worth celebrating. But at 11% of the Fortune 500, and with board gains slowing, the pace of change does not match the size of the talent pool. Note also that fewer companies are now disclosing board-diversity data (60% in 2025, down from 91%), making progress harder to track (Altrata, 2025; Hinchliffe, 2025).
3. Entrepreneurship
Key numbers
~14.5M: Women-owned businesses in the U.S. — about 39% of all firms (Wells Fargo, 2025)
$3.3T: Annual revenue generated by women-owned businesses (Wells Fargo, 2025)
~13M: People employed by women-owned businesses (Wells Fargo, 2025)
49%: Share of new businesses launched by women in 2024 — highest in five years (Wells Fargo, 2025)
14.2M / $2.8T: Women-owned firms and receipts, 2023 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025)
Women are now starting nearly half of all new U.S. businesses a 69% jump over five years. The entrepreneurial engine is strong. The gap is scale: women-owned firms still account for a disproportionately small share of total business revenue and employment, pointing to barriers in access to capital, markets, and networks rather than in ambition or founding rates (Wells Fargo, 2025; U.S. Census Bureau, 2025).
4. Access to Capital
Key numbers
~1% Share of U.S. VC funding going to companies founded solely by women in 2024 (Conrad, 2025)
2.3% Global VC dollars to female-only founding teams, 2024 (Founders Forum Group, 2025)
$38.8B Raised by companies with at least one female founder in 2024 — up 27% YoY (Founders Forum Group, 2025)
~2.3x gap Avg. deal size: female-only teams ($5.2M) vs. male-only teams ($11.7M) (Founders Forum Group, 2025)
This is the sharpest disparity in the data. Despite founding businesses at record rates, wholly women-led companies attracted roughly 1% of venture capital in 2024. Even mixed-gender teams raise far less per deal. Closing this funding gap is arguably the single highest-leverage lever for accelerating women’s economic impact (Conrad, 2025; Founders Forum Group, 2025).
5. The Pay Gap
Key numbers
~81¢: What women working full-time, year-round earn for every $1 men earn (USAFacts, 2025)
Widening: The gap has barely moved in two decades and recently widened (Kochhar, 2025)
58¢: Latinas’ earnings for every $1 paid to white men (USAFacts, 2025)
~58¢: American Indian & Alaska Native women, per $1 to white men (USAFacts, 2025)
The overall gap has barely moved in two decades and recently widened. It compounds dramatically for women of color. Frame this not as an isolated HR issue but as lost lifetime earnings, reduced retirement security, and drag on household and national economic output (Kochhar, 2025; USAFacts, 2025).
6. The Business Case
The argument for advancing women isn’t only about fairness; the performance data is compelling (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
• Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 39% more likely to financially outperform bottom-quartile peers, up from 15% in 2015 (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
• Top-quartile companies for board gender diversity are 27% more likely to outperform (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
• Firms with more than 30% women in leadership significantly outperform those at or below 30% (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
Balanced note: Some researchers caution that the causation may run partly in reverse — that profitable firms invest more in diversity. Either way, the correlation between women in leadership and strong performance is consistent and well-documented (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
7. Closing
The past year gave us record numbers and real reasons for optimism: more women CEOs than ever, half of new businesses founded by women, and mounting evidence that diverse leadership drives results. But the funding gap, a widening pay gap, and slowing board progress remind us that momentum is not the same as parity. The opportunity is enormous: closing these gaps is not charity; it is one of the largest untapped sources of economic growth available to us.
References
Altrata. (2025). Gender diversity in corporate America in 2025. Altrata. https://altrata.com/reports/gender-diversity-in-corporate-america-in-2025
Conrad, J. (2025, February 4). Wholly women-led companies attracted just 1 percent of VC funding in 2024, tanking an already abysmal stat. Inc. https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/wholly-women-led-companies-attracted-just-1-of-vc-funding-in-2024-tanking-an-already-abysmal-stat/91156396
Founders Forum Group. (2025). Women in VC & startup funding: Statistics & trends (2025 report). https://ff.co/women-funding-statistics-2025/
Hinchliffe, E. (2025, June 2). Women CEOs run 11% of Fortune 500 companies in 2025. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/06/02/fortune-500-companies-run-by-female-ceos-women-2025/
Kochhar, R. (2025, March 4). Gender pay gap in U.S. has narrowed slightly over 2 decades. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/gender-pay-gap-in-us-has-narrowed-slightly-over-2-decades/
McKinsey & Company. (2023, December 5). Diversity matters even more: The case for holistic impact. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact
U.S. Census Bureau. (2025, November 20). Census Bureau releases new data about characteristics of employer and nonemployer business owners (Release No. CB25-TPS.77). https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/business-owner-characteristics.html
USAFacts. (2025). What is the gender pay gap in the US? USAFacts. https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-in-the-united-states/country/united-states/
Wells Fargo. (2025). 2025 impact of women-owned businesses report. Wells Fargo. https://smallbusinessresources.wf.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/wells-fargo-2025-impact-of-women-owned-businesses.pdf
Note. In-text citations follow APA 7th edition. For sources without a named individual author, the organization is used as the group author. Dates reflect publication where available
Thank you Diane, lashanda brown, Akash Das, and many others for tuning into my live video with Aisha | The Business Witch! Join me for my next live video in the app.
