I Tried to Live Off Women-Owned Businesses. Turns Out, Men Still Run Everything

There are not many pasta companies run by women. I discovered this while standing in the aisle of my grocery store on the third day of a weeklong effort to buy things only from companies owned by or run by women, as I frantically Googled “CEO” alongside “Barilla,” “De Cecco” and then, desperately, “Banza.”

Nor are there many women-run companies that make canned beans, tomato sauce, milk (oh, the irony), beef—or a laundry list of other grocery products. Nor laundry detergent, for that matter. This was something I knew, in principle, but that became very clear the week I vowed to only spend my money at companies run by women. I kept thinking I’d found something I could buy, like Organic Girl lettuce, which screams “female” from its purple label and curly font, only to find the face of a male CEO or owner smiling up at me from the company’s website. (In Organic Girl’s case, one of the company’s most prominent investors, Steve Taylor, is also on the board of Capitol Ministries, which led a White House Bible study in the Trump Administration that prohibited women from teaching the Bible to grown men.)