When We Drag Emma Grede, We Drag Ourselves.

Women are relentlessly draggggging Emma Grede for her new book — and the part that’s breaking my brain is that the math on what that costs us is sitting right in front of us. Women-owned businesses are 39.1% of all U.S. companies. Women reinvest 90% of their earnings back into the village. McKinsey says full participation adds $28 trillion to global GDP. So no, this is not a vibes piece. This is an economic argument for cutting it out. Read me out.

What’s in This Post

• The Drag and the Real Critique
• The Math No One Wants to Talk About
• The Village Part — Why Women Reinvest 90%
• The Real Punchline
• Read the Book With Us — Quarterly Book Club Kicks Off in May

The Drag and the Real Critique

Women are relentlessly draggggging Emma Grede for her new book, Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life. The viral lightning rod was her line about being a “max three-hour mom” on the weekends. The internet lit up.

Black women, in particular, called out the privilege baked into that comment. Grede has nannies, a chef, housekeepers, and a chief of staff. Most of us don’t. That critique is real and I won’t pretend otherwise. The economics of motherhood look different when you can outsource the parts that crush most of us by Tuesday.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: Mother of 4. Wife. Entrepreneur. I am also a mother, a wife, an entrepreneur. I’m a non-technical solo founder building Theanna at $232,706 ARR with a team of 2. And when I see a woman who clearly understands the internal war of building something while raising humans — and I watch other women annihilate her for telling the truth about how she’s actually surviving it — I get *real* tired.

“Move the fuck on. You can disagree. You can nod your head and go on with your life. But the public bloodletting? The performative outrage? It costs us more than people realize. And I mean that literally.”

The Math No One Wants to Talk About

Let me put numbers on this — because the cost of women tearing down women is not just emotional. It is economic.

According to the Wells Fargo 2024 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report, women-owned businesses now make up 39.1% of all U.S. businesses — over 14 million companies, employing 12.2 million workers, generating $2.7 trillion in revenue.

• 2019–2023: Women-owned businesses grew at nearly 2x the rate of those owned by men
• 2022–2023: That growth rate jumped to 4.5x the rate of male-owned businesses
• Black women–owned businesses: Average revenue grew 32.7%
• Latina-owned businesses: Average revenue grew 17.1%

We are not playing. And we are just getting started. McKinsey Global Institute’s landmark Power of Parity report ran the global numbers: if women participated in the economy on equal footing with men, it would add $28 trillion to global GDP — roughly the size of the U.S. and Chinese economies *combined.*

“That isn’t a feel-good statistic. That is the largest unclaimed economic opportunity on the planet, and it has our name on it.”

The Village Part — Why Women Reinvest 90%

Here’s the part that should make every one of us take a breath before we type the next quote-tweet.

Research from the Harvard Kennedy School Center for International Development found that women reinvest up to 90% of their earnings back into their families and communities. Men reinvest 30–40%.

Read that again.

Every dollar a woman earns is *almost three times more likely* to circle back into the village — schools, food, childcare, generational wealth, the literal infrastructure of the people we love. When a woman builds a business and wins, the whole block eats.

This is what “collective wealth” actually means. Not a hashtag. Not a vibe. A measurable, repeatable economic pattern: women win → the village wins → the next generation of women is born into a higher floor.

So when we drag a woman for being honest about how she’s surviving the impossible math of motherhood + ambition… when we make a public example of every woman who admits she’s not perfect… we don’t just hurt her. We make it harder for the next woman to be honest. We shrink the pipeline. We tax the village. We leave that $28 trillion sitting on the table.

The Real Punchline

Emma Grede has nannies. Most of us don’t. That’s a real critique. But the answer to *“she has more support than I do”* isn’t to cancel her. The answer is to demand the support structure she has — paid leave, affordable childcare, household help that isn’t classed as a luxury — for the rest of us.

Ambition is not the enemy. Honesty about ambition is not the enemy. The enemy is a system that makes it so expensive for women to win that the ones who do win look like aliens to the rest of us.

You don’t fix that by dragging Emma Grede. You fix it by funding more women, building more women, *backing* more women — including the imperfect ones. Especially the imperfect ones.

So — read the book. Disagree with parts of it. Take what serves you. Leave the rest. But before you fire off the next quote-tweet aimed at a woman who dared to tell the truth out loud, ask yourself one question:

“Am I putting more weight on the village, or less?”

Read the Book With Us — Quarterly Book Club Kicks Off in May

We’re launching the Theanna Quarterly Book Club in May, and our inaugural pick is *Start With Yourself.* We’re going to read it. We’re going to argue about it. We’re going to pull out the lessons that actually move our businesses forward — together, in a room full of women who are building.

Join Theanna before May 1 and we’ll mail you a free copy of the book for the inaugural quarterly book club. After that, the book club continues every quarter as a Theanna member benefit.