– Founding story. Forty percent of female founders say that macroeconomic conditions have hurt their businesses—and 46% say that political uncertainty in the U.S. is a direct threat, too. But amid the challenges of tariffs, weakened consumer confidence, and political attacks on diversity and inclusion, female founders see opportunity in other areas—namely, AI.

The early-stage VC firm Graham & Walker gathered these results from a survey of 180 female founders of “VC scalable” startups in North America.

Fifty-six percent of all-female founding teams see “more opportunities” because of AI, compared to only 46% of mixed-gender founding teams who say the same. This report speculates that female founders—who also cite fundraising as, still, a major challenge—could be looking at AI as a way to scale with less capital and avoid some of those fundraising challenges. Seventy-one percent of founders surveyed said raising their last round was harder than they thought it would be. Forty percent of founders still say their gender was a top factor in that difficulty. In 2024, according to Pitchbook, teams including female founders raised 27% more capital than the year prior, with $38 billion closed—but across 13.1% fewer deals than 2023.

Other fundraising challenges include “shifting goalposts”—with norms changing for early-stage funding and early-stage investors expecting founders to meet benchmarks that might have previously been reserved for Series A.

Fourteen founders in the survey specifically called out their experiences with female investors. Many of the concerns they raised are likely related to the pressure those female investors are under. One founder surveyed said female investors are “harder to win over” and “require every box to be checked,” while another said that they’ve pitched women who have “no real ability to do deals.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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– To the top. At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last week, two new documentaries aired that, while wildly different, had something in common. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything and Call Her Alex, the two-part documentary about podcaster Alex Cooper now streaming on Hulu, both showed what it took to get to the top of the male-dominated media business—in two very different eras.

Tell Me Everything traces the story of Barbara Walters, the first woman to co-anchor an evening news program in the U.S. She made her debut in that role on ABC in 1976, breaking the hardest glass ceiling for women in journalism and television. The film by director Jackie Jesko follows the barriers Walters continued to break, from her famous celebrity sitdown interviews to her late-in-life reinvention on The View, alongside her personal struggles. While she married, divorced, and had a child, her personal life often suffered, the documentary observes. “Her job was the love of her life,” one talking head says on camera.

“She was an incredibly ambitious woman who loved the work, loved being on TV, she loved the thrill of the chase, she loved the competition,” says Jesko. “She got a lot of joy out of it—and it doesn’t always have to be a huge personal life that brings someone joy.” Jane Rosenthal, the cofounder and CEO of the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, adds: “We grew up with her—and you didn’t realize what she was really doing as a woman, that she was the only woman in the room, the kind of fights that she had to have.”

Still, other era-defining women in media, including Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, reflect in the documentary about how seeing Walters’ path influenced their own choices. Couric says she knew she didn’t want to sacrifice her family life for her career, after seeing Walters.

Which brings us to the next Tribeca documentary. Alex Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy and media mogul behind the Unwell network, has often been called the millennial or Gen Z Oprah. In Tell Me Everything, Winfrey remembers watching Walters to learn how to succeed as an on-air journalist. Without Barbara, there would be no Oprah. And without Oprah, there would be no Alex.

Cooper built Call Her Daddy within Barstool Sports, another overwhelmingly male-dominated media company. Her new documentary traces her upbringing, an experience of sexual harassment in college that she now says motivated her to never be silenced again, and the rise of her podcast.

Several decades after Walters’ career, Cooper doesn’t have to make the same trade-offs that Walters did. Her husband is her business partner. While Walters struggled with private insecurity about her appearance, another topic of Tell Me Everything, Cooper shares her most personal experiences and challenges with her audience. “She didn’t just build an audience, she built a movement,” Rosenthal said while introducing Call Her Alex. Rather than being beholden to someone else’s platform—like a television network—Cooper has been able to build her own.

Despite all these obvious differences, watching the films back-to-back, it’s clear Cooper and Walters have a lot in common. “I’m a competitive mother*******,” Cooper says. “I’m hard on myself.”

As much as the media industry has changed—the drive it takes to get to the top hasn’t.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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