Just one woman has ever founded and led a Fortune 500 company. Here’s her story
– 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
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com