About 130 countries lack solid legal protection against gender discrimination in access to credit, according to the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law database. This includes famously progressive countries like Norway, Switzerland, and even Iceland.

Making a point to be a supportive advocate for female entrepreneurs can help our industry as a whole, as well. When we begin to see each other as role models and inspiration, we help one another grow.

With the recent success of companies like The Honest Company and Thinx, we’re seeing a new rise of women-centered innovation: products and services designed for women by women, based on the pain points women experience in daily life. The investment ecosystem is unprepared to understand this opportunity, much less identify, invest in, and nurture this next generation of companies. The coming shift will have deep implications for the role women will play in the future of business, tech, and innovation.

From entrepreneurs to leaders of major companies, these Native-American business leaders have applied under-represented cultural perspectives to help build successful companies.

The Spotlight found that 71 percent of female small business owners believe that at least 25 states will sponsor state-enacted paid maternity leave policies over the next 20 years. Additionally, the Merrill Edge report found that 38 percent of women believe it is very important that their investments benefit the advancement of women. In other words, both studies found that women foresee further progress in the workplace and want investments that support them.

We secured the participation of 57 female CEOs — 41 from Fortune 1000 companies and 16 from large privately held companies. We then conducted a series of in-depth individual interviews, delving into pivotal experiences in their personal history and career progression, and using Korn Ferry’s executive online assessment to measure key personality traits and drivers that had an impact. Our goal: to crack the code of these women’s success, in order to help organizations better identify and leverage their highest-potential female leaders and to ensure more women succeed in the future.

Some of the UK's biggest firms are being urged to do more to recruit women into senior positions. The call came in a government-backed review which found that FTSE 100 companies were "on course" to meet a voluntary 33% target for women on boards by 2020. But it said smaller firms on the London Stock Exchange were lagging behind.

Our nation is moving forward, but the progression is sluggish at best and continually hindered by unexpected, outdated potholes. Present day, there are business leaders who recommend women hide their gender during business interactions. Just last year the Wall Street Journal published a “helpful” article titled “Why Women in Tech Might Consider Just Using Their Initials Online.”

Our findings uncovered a significant blind spot when it comes to women business owners and the U.S. tax code. In fact, our survey data – together with our review of existing tax research on the topic – suggest that many women-owned companies are unable to fully access more than US$255 billion worth of tax incentives Congress has designed to help small businesses.

On Wall Street, Mary Gage found herself frustrated with being shut out of stockbroking on venues like the New York Stock Exchange, the artery of America’s growing place on the international financial stage. So, in 1880, the finance-savvy associate of suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton started her own exchange—just for women—who wanted to use their own money to speculate on railroad stocks.

Dana Kanze, the Harvard Business Review study’s author, led a team of Columbia University researchers to comb through almost 200 videos of entrepreneurs pitching at a TechCrunch funding competition in New York. She tracked the words investors used when asking questions and found they use different words depending on the gender of the entrepreneur. When speaking to men, investors used words like "gain," "hope," "ideal," "accomplish," "achieve," "aspire," "obtain," "earn," "expand" and "grow." But female entrepreneurs, said Kanze, hear a different kind of language. The questions investors ask them include words like "accuracy," "afraid," "anxious," "avoid," "careful," "conservative," "defend," "fear," "loss," "obligation" and "pain."