By Coco Brown

This Forbes piece stopped me mid-scroll… https://www.forbes.com/sites/meggenharris/2026/04/07/why-women-over-50-are-becoming-the-most-powerful-founders-in-business/?utm_campaign=ForbesMainLI&utm_source=ForbesMainLinkedIn&utm_medium=social
And not just because it validates what I’ve believed for years.

“At this stage, the question is no longer ‘What can I do?’ It becomes ‘What is actually worth building?'”

That question is the turning point: the moment so many women reach after decades of climbing, delivering, and proving themselves. And what comes next isn’t a slowdown. It’s a reckoning.

I’ve spent the last decade building Athena Alliance, and one of the greatest privileges of that work is having a front-row seat to what women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s are actually capable of. I’ll tell you what I see…

Women who are not winding down. Women who are igniting.

Shelly Morales with MoralesHR
Christine / Chris Heckart with Xapa
Zenia Tata with Entrokey Labs
Tammy Schuring with Polymathic
Julie Omran with Immutaverse
Jill Hinson with ChangeFusion, LLC
Purvee Kondal, NACD.DC Ambassador with PortlyAI
Jeanine Wright with Inception Point AI
Cynthia Abbott Kerr with Wellpay.ai
MONA ZANDER with matchAmint
Solveig Johannessen with Dova Health Intelligence
Terrisa Duenas, PhD with ESTE Leverage
Samira Golsefid, PhD with Keeper

and more…

They’re founding companies. Joining boards. Writing checks. Mentoring the next generation into rooms they’ve spent decades learning to navigate. They’re doing all of it — often simultaneously — and they’re doing it better than ever.

Why? Because 25+ years of experience isn’t baggage. It’s a blueprint.

The networks these women have built — real relationships, forged through trust and time — aren’t just professionally useful. They’re transformational. Because when a woman with that kind of depth founds a company, she doesn’t build alone. She brings other women with her. Into the C-suite. Onto the board. Into the cap table.

That’s how individual impact becomes collective impact.

That’s how we actually move the needle — not just on representation, but on power.

At Athena, I see this every single day. Our members aren’t asking for permission to lead. They’re leading, and they’re pulling the ladder back down for everyone behind them. They’re proving that the most powerful thing a woman can do with her success is use it to accelerate someone else’s.

Meggen Harris is right: this is not a “second act.” There is nothing secondary about it.

This is prime time.

The data is catching up to what we’ve always known. Now the question is whether the capital and the institutions will catch up too.

I believe they will because the women building, governing, investing, and creating right now aren’t asking for the spotlight. They’re too busy doing the work.

And the results are going to be impossible to ignore.