How Matriarchal Societies (and Gen Z Founders) Redirect Power Toward the Collective

Patriarchal systems tend to optimize for a single scoreboard: growth, profit, market share. Matrilineal and matriarchal societies--where lineage, land, and decision-making run through women--tend to optimize for something different: the health and cohesion of the whole community. The research bears this out again and again, from who eats to who gets protected to where generosity flows.

Let’s start with hunger. Roughly 60% of the world's undernourished people are women or girls, and giving women access to education and employment has been shown to sharply reduce overall hunger and improve child health and education.

That same pattern shows up in safety and mental wellbeing. A landmark NBER study on Africa's "matrilineal belt" found that women in matrilineal societies are less likely to believe domestic violence is justified, are less likely to experience it, and hold greater autonomy over their own decisions. Cross-cultural anthropological research identifies matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent as two of the strongest predictors of women's political participation, alongside lower rates of inter-group violence, and scholars of "modern matriarchal studies" describe these mother-centered systems as structured around caretaking, need-orientation, and nonviolent conflict resolution, values that benefit everyone in the community, not just women.

It carries through to how we treat the rest of the living world, too. Women support more charitable causes overall and show notably stronger support for animal welfare than men do, and women are also more likely than men to donate specifically to environmental causes. Nonprofit researchers consistently find women's giving skews toward animal and children's welfare, especially at the local, community level.

None of this is incidental, it's a consistent worldview showing up in the data on generosity itself. Across income levels and generations, women are consistently more likely to give to charity, and to give more, than men. And when women's own income rises, that money doesn't just accumulate: a $10,000 increase in a woman's income raises household giving by 5%, compared to 3% when the same increase comes from a man's income.

We just watched this play out in real time. When Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins unveiled the Global Goals Platform, a next step in her and her husband's plan to eventually give away roughly $13 billion, the bulk of their equity in the company, she didn't just write checks. She asked ordinary people what changes they'd most want to see in the world. Jenny Stojkovic’s Instagram post picked up that exact question and put it to her own audience, and millions of women answered, a small, live demonstration of the instinct the research points to over and over: given power and resources, women tend to redirect them toward collective wellbeing rather than accumulation alone.

Note: true "matriarchy" remains a contested category among anthropologists, and not all matrilineal societies were notably less violent, how much of these patterns comes down to biology, culture, or economics is still an open debate.

Women's overall share of new U.S. business owners slipped to 44% in 2025, down from a near-parity 49% in 2024, but that topline dip hides a generational split that's reshaping who starts businesses in America. Nearly all of the decline traces back to fewer women launching goods-producing businesses, think manufacturing, construction, wholesale trade, rather than any broad retreat from entrepreneurship. Women actually kept gaining ground in community services.

Break it down by generation, though, and the real story emerges. Gen Z women hit 47% of new Gen Z-owned businesses in 2025, up from 38% the year before, the highest female share of any generation on record. Baby Boomer women, meanwhile, saw the steepest drop, falling to 23% from 36%, with Millennial women also losing share.

Why the divergence? Caregiving looks like a big piece of it. Women are 47% more likely than men to shut down a business for family or personal reasons, a burden that falls hardest on the Millennial and Boomer women currently in peak caregiving years for kids or aging parents. Gen Z women, largely a decade or more away from those pressures, are launching businesses freer of that drag. Forbes has documented a similar pattern among high-growth women founders: even amid record gains, family responsibilities remain the hardest barrier to clear.

Bottom line, the founder gender gap isn't closing evenly, it's being rewritten generation by generation, with Gen Z women leading the way while their older peers get squeezed by the same caregiving demands that have shaped women's careers for decades.

🍑 Last bites of summer.

Before the produce aisle turns fully to pumpkin, make the most of peak peaches, corn, and tomatoes with a couple of easy transition recipes: try the green curry scallops with corn, or browse Minimalist Baker's late-summer produce guide for more ideas. For dessert, this peach and blackberry crumble is worth bookmarking while peaches are still in season.