The Myth of the Bootstrap
Series: Economic Mobility in 2026 — Post 2 of 12
Published June 22, 2026 | Emerge and Rise, Inc. | Dr. Lina Rugova
Women, immigrants, and veterans start businesses at rates that outpace their share of the population. On paper, the numbers look like a success story. The data underneath them tells a different one.
Start with the headline figures, because they are real and they matter. Women own more than 40% of all U.S. businesses. Immigrants represent 21% of business owners nationally, exceeding their 14% share of the population and their 17% share of the labor force. Veterans own 1.6 million firms and employ 3.2 million workers. These communities are not waiting to be invited into the economy. They are building inside it, often with less support than their counterparts and more to prove.
But ownership is not the same as access. And access is what determines whether a business survives its third year, hires its first employee, or secures the credit line it needs to get through a slow quarter. The gap between who starts a business and who gets the infrastructure to grow one is where the bootstrap narrative breaks down.
The Scale Problem
Women-owned businesses represent 39.2% of all U.S. businesses, according to the 2025 Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report. They account for 9.6% of employment and 6.2% of revenues. The businesses exist. The conditions for them to grow have not followed.
The pattern shows up clearly in business size. According to QuickBooks' 2026 Women Entrepreneurs report, 42% of women entrepreneurs operate as solopreneurs, compared to 19% of men. Only 22% of women lead firms with 10 to 49 employees, versus 33% of men. Immigrant-owned businesses cluster similarly in sole proprietorships, particularly in industries like construction, food service, and retail, where startup costs are lower but access to business credit is harder to secure. For veterans, the transition from military structure to civilian business ownership often happens without the professional networks that would help them scale, since those networks were built in a context that does not translate directly to civilian markets.
Solopreneurship is not a personal choice in these cases. It is frequently the ceiling that access to capital sets.
What Capital Access Actually Looks Like
The data on funding gaps is not subtle. Women-founded businesses averaged $935,000 in total funding, compared to $2.1 million for businesses founded by men, according to a May 2026 Forbes analysis. That gap is not explained by performance. BCG research found that women-founded startups generate 78 cents for every dollar of funding received, compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies. Women are building more efficiently with less. The problem is not output. It is access to the input.
Venture capital is one lens, and it is a narrow one that does not apply to most small businesses. But it illustrates a pattern that repeats at every level of the capital stack. Of the $289 billion invested globally in 2024, female-only founding teams received 2.3% of the total, or $6.7 billion. All-male teams received 83.6%, or $241.9 billion. That gap widens at later funding stages, meaning the further along a women-founded company gets, the smaller its share of available capital becomes.
For immigrant entrepreneurs, the barriers show up differently. Loan denial rates for immigrant business owners are higher than for native-born owners with equivalent financials, driven in part by credit history that does not transfer across borders, collateral requirements that disadvantage newer arrivals, and language barriers in the application process. Many rely on community lending networks or personal savings at rates that limit how fast they can grow. The 2026 Small Business Majority immigration fact sheet documents that immigration status itself creates legal and financial uncertainty that makes traditional lenders reluctant to extend credit, regardless of the business's actual performance.
Veterans face a different version of the same problem. Military service builds skills in leadership, logistics, operations, and crisis management. Civilian lenders and investors frequently do not know how to read those credentials. The D'Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University found in 2025 that veterans report difficulty translating their service experience into the language of business plans and pitch decks, not because the skills are not there, but because the translation infrastructure is missing.
The Network Problem
Capital gaps compound when informal investment networks are added. Roughly 65% of informal investments globally go to men. More than 75% of male investors report investing primarily in other men, according to Forbes. These are not deliberate exclusion policies. They are the result of networks built over time that reflect who was in the room. Women, immigrants, and veterans were not consistently in those rooms.
Firms with at least one female partner invest 2.3 times more in female founders, according to Founders Forum Group. Firms with 30% or more female partners invest 4.7 times more. The data suggests that representation in investment decision-making directly changes who gets capital, which means the current composition of those firms is not a neutral condition.
For immigrants and veterans, the parallel is clear. Mentorship and investment networks built around those communities, SCORE chapters with veteran advisors, immigrant business associations, women-focused angel networks, produce different outcomes than the general market does on its own. The infrastructure of who knows whom, and who vouches for whom, is not incidental to business success. It is one of its primary inputs.
What This Costs
The economic cost of these gaps is not abstract. Researchers estimate that gender parity in entrepreneurship alone would add between $5 and $6 trillion in net value to the global economy. That figure comes from the economic activity that does not happen because businesses do not get the capital to hire, expand, serve more customers, or survive downturns.
In San Antonio, 399,000 immigrants represent 15% of the metro population and $11.8 billion in annual spending power, according to a 2026 FWD.us analysis. Roughly 40,000 of them are self-employed entrepreneurs. The city is also home to five military installations and a veteran population that constitutes a significant share of its workforce and its business community. Women own a substantial portion of the city's small businesses. These communities are not on the margins of San Antonio's economy. They are load-bearing parts of it.
The bootstrap narrative says that determination and effort are what separate the businesses that make it from the ones that don't. The data says that capital, networks, and institutional support are doing a significant share of that work, and that access to those things is still not distributed equally. Acknowledging that is not pessimism. It is the starting point for building something more accurate.
Sources
Forbes (May 2026): More Women Are Becoming Entrepreneurs. But Something Is Keeping Them From Scaling
WIPP Education Institute: 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Research
QuickBooks: Women Entrepreneurs 2026
Founders Forum Group: Women in VC & Startup Funding: 2025 Report
Immigration Research Initiative (2026): The Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Profile of Business Owners Across the United States
Small Business Majority (2026): Immigration and Small Business Fact Sheet
SBA Office of Advocacy: Veteran Ownership Statistics 2025
D'Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (2025): From Service to Startup
FWD.us (April 2026): Immigrants Make San Antonio Metro Stronger
U.S. Census Bureau (2025): Business Owner Characteristics
[← Read previous: San Antonio Is Booming. Who Is It For?]
Up next: Capital is one part of what these founders carry. There is another cost that doesn't show up on a balance sheet. In the next post, we look at the research on cognitive and emotional labor, and what it means for women running a business while managing everything else.
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