Sallie Krawcheck had climbed to the top of the finance world, holding senior executive roles at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch – until the day she was abruptly fired. Reflecting on her nonlinear career, she noticed a troubling pattern: financial advisors routinely gave women different advice than men. The message was clear: “Save cautiously, minimize risk, and prioritize financial security over wealth accumulation.” But this formula failed to account for the realities women face – career interruptions to care for children or aging parents, lower lifetime earnings than men, and the stark fact that they live longer – meaning their savings need to stretch further.
The gender pay gap means women earn on average about 82.7 cents for every dollar men make – a disparity that compounds over decades. As a result, women retire with roughly 30% less savings than men, despite needing their money to last longer. But the financial penalties don’t stop there. Mothers face a lasting ‘motherhood penalty’, earning 5–10% less per child. Even a single year off can lead to a staggering 39% decline in long-term earnings. At the same time, women are expected to shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid caregiving, further widening the financial gap.
“Rather than simply adjusting existing products, Ellevest completely redesigned investing to account for career breaks, lower lifetime earnings, and longer retirements, transforming personal frustration into powerful social innovation.”
This financial strategy that Krawcheck had been told her entire career ignored the realities women face, built on a default that assumes uninterrupted careers and stable earnings – not career breaks, pay gaps, and longer lifespans – with deep consequences: systematic underinvestment and financial insecurity.
In response, Krawcheck launched Ellevest, an investment platform designed specifically for women’s real-life scenarios. Rather than simply adjusting existing products, Ellevest completely redesigned investing to account for career breaks, lower lifetime earnings, and longer retirements, transforming personal frustration into powerful social innovation.
When Carol Fishman Cohen, a Harvard Business School graduate and finance professional, stepped away from her corporate finance career during the global financial crisis, she expected to take a short break. Instead, it stretched into 11 years and four children. When she was ready to return to the workforce, she faced puzzled interviewers repeatedly asking, “What have you been doing all these years?”
She realized the hiring system did not see the rich life skills gained during her career breaks and undervalued her experience before motherhood. Research shows that a “paradox of meritocracy” exists in organizations explicitly emphasizing meritocracy which results in more bias in evaluations. When we define merit through traditional metrics – salary, uninterrupted career progression, confidence in self-promotion – we risk rewarding those who have had fewer systemic barriers to overcome.
In response, Fishman Cohen created iRelaunch and partnered with companies on “returnships,” structured internships for experienced professionals re-entering the workforce. Companies suddenly recognized an untapped talent pool of highly skilled and motivated professionals. What began as a solution to her own challenge became a hiring innovation, not only facilitating individual career comebacks but also pushing organizations to rethink and expand their approach to talent acquisition. The answer, then, is not to abandon merit but to redefine it.
The Safecity platform provides critical data to urban planners, transforming women's everyday fears into actionable insights, fundamentally reshaping public safety for all city residents.
ElsaMarie D’Silva had always carefully mapped out her routes, instinctively adjusting her behavior for safety – an unspoken reality shared by women everywhere. But when a colleague casually mentioned persistent harassment in their neighborhood, D’Silva realized something troubling: women’s everyday fears were invisible in traditional public safety planning.
In response, she founded Safecity, a platform that crowdsources women’s real experiences of harassment to create detailed safety maps. This innovation provided critical data to urban planners, transforming women’s everyday fears into actionable insights, fundamentally reshaping public safety for all city residents.
By 2021, Safecity had collected over 25,000 reports, empowering communities to advocate for improved public safety measures. For example, data indicating high rates of harassment near poorly lit public toilets led to community-driven initiatives to enhance lighting and maintenance in those areas. But Safecity’s impact extends beyond data collection; it fosters community engagement and policy advocacy. In 2021, the platform collaborated with the Bumble dating app on the Stand for Safety initiative, releasing an online safety guide to educate users about safe online interactions.
What brings these experiences of these women together is the fact that they are not not just entrepreneurs, they are lifepreneurs – entrepreneurs who identify a systemic gap through personal experience, recognize both a market failure and an opportunity, and build businesses that are both profitable and impactful. Unlike traditional entrepreneurs who start with a commercial opportunity, or social entrepreneurs who focus primarily on mission-driven change, lifepreneurs sit at the intersection. They innovate out of life experience, turning personal challenges into scalable, market-driven solutions that reshape the system.
None of the challenges these lifepreneurs addressed were hidden. Women face an investment gap, career breaks make re-entering the workforce difficult, and violence against women is pervasive in most societies. Yet these realities are often treated as ‘normal life,’ – blind spots overlooked by HR recruiters, policymakers, and the financial sector, concealed by systems that never accounted for women’s experiences, and hidden in plain sight because the default framework was designed without women in mind. None of these problems are inevitable; they are choices.
Lifepreneurs challenged long-accepted norms revealing how existing systems were built on incomplete foundations that failed to account for diverse lived experiences.
What these lifepreneurs did wasn’t about seeking special treatment. They challenged long-accepted norms revealing how existing systems were built on incomplete foundations that failed to account for diverse lived experiences. Their innovations weren’t about creating separate, women-only solutions, they were about exposing fundamental flaws in the status quo and designing better alternatives that work for everyone.
Consider the untapped potential that was hiding in plain sight. Before returnships, companies routinely overlooked highly skilled professionals eager to return to work,until iRelaunch proved they were a high-impact talent pool. Before Ellevest, financial advisors underestimated the billions in capital that women were hesitant to invest under outdated, male-centric strategies. Before Safecity, policymakers ignored the unspoken, daily navigation of fear that shaped how half the population moved through cities until data made it impossible to ignore.
When markets and institutions fail to recognize an entire segment of the population, they do not just disadvantage that group, they shrink the talent pipeline, misallocate financial resources, and design public systems that fail to serve real needs. The women who stepped in to address these gaps didn’t just remove barriers for women, they unlocked overlooked economic value, revealed smarter ways to invest and hire, and made communities safer for everyone.
By making previously invisible challenges visible, they created both profitable businesses and meaningful systemic change. Their success wasn’t about carving out separate solutions for women but about fixing broken systems for everyone. The question now isn’t whether these gaps exist, but who will step up next to close them.
The lifepreneur journey looks very different depending on where you are – and who you are. Even this article is shaped by my own default of a Western-centric life. So, if you’re a lifepreneur with a different cultural or life experience I’d love to hear from you.
The pandemic sparked a shift to remote work that’s proving hard to reverse. According to Prof. Manju Ahuja, hybrid models are the new norm—driven by employee expectations, technological advances, and a changing...
Many regional developers have tried and failed to emulate Silicon Valley’s VC-driven model for innovation. Detroit, the birthplace of Ford, is following an alternative route – with promising results....
Audio available
Responsible for TIME magazine’s iconic covers, D W Pine explores his creative process and shares insights on how to cut through the noise and make an impact....
Used boldly and responsibly, AI could drive powerful positive change, argues Google’s AI business strategist....
Audio availableExplore first person business intelligence from top minds curated for a global executive audience