A 2024 systematic review published in PLOS One analyzed 31 studies on refugee women and economic inclusion. The pooled employment rate across those studies: 31.1%. For context, that figure includes women working in every sector, every income bracket, every country of resettlement. Nearly 7 in 10 refugee women are not working.

The barriers are not mysterious. They are well-documented. And they compound.

The double barrier

Refugee entrepreneurs already face a specific set of structural challenges: no US credit history, limited documentation recognized by mainstream lenders, unfamiliarity with regulatory requirements, and exclusion from professional networks. These are real and solvable with the right support.

Refugee women face all of those — and a second layer on top.

The PLOS One review identified four categories of barriers that fall disproportionately on refugee women:

Work permit and documentation delays. Refugee women are more likely to be the secondary applicant on household documentation, which in some resettlement systems means their individual work authorization lags behind. Starting a business requires a business bank account. A business bank account requires an EIN. An EIN application requires documented identity. Each step in the chain takes longer for women who arrived as dependents.

Non-recognition of qualifications. Many refugee women arrive with substantial professional backgrounds — teachers, nurses, business owners, farmers, traders. None of it transfers automatically. In the US market, prior credentials from non-English-speaking countries are rarely recognized, and the cost and time required to requalify puts licensed professions out of reach. Entrepreneurship becomes not a choice but a necessity pathway.

Financing discrimination. A 2025 study published in ScienceDirect analyzing crowdfunding outcomes for female refugee entrepreneurs found that they are less likely to be fully funded than non-refugee women — even when controlling for campaign quality, business sector, and funding goal. The refugee identifier alone creates a penalty in informal capital markets.

Caregiving constraints. Refugee women are disproportionately responsible for childcare and household management, particularly in the first years of resettlement when family support networks are absent. A 12-week bootcamp that runs Saturday mornings works for a man with family support. It may not work for a woman managing three children, a second-shift job, and resettlement appointments simultaneously.

What structured support changes

The same PLOS One review found that peer support — specifically cohort-based programs where women learn and build alongside others in similar circumstances — was among the highest-impact interventions for refugee women's economic inclusion.

This is not coincidental. Peer cohorts solve multiple problems at once. They create social capital that replaces the absent family network. They normalize the challenges so women don't attribute their struggles to personal failure. They enable flexible scheduling when the cohort sets its own norms. They produce accountability that external programs can't manufacture.

The 2025 OECD International Migration Outlook on migrant entrepreneurship noted that immigrant women are significantly more likely than immigrant men to report entrepreneurship as a necessity rather than an opportunity. The language is careful, but the implication is clear: many immigrant and refugee women are building businesses because they have no better options — not because they've been resourced to pursue the options they want.

What Rock Forward does differently

Rock Forward's bootcamp structure accommodates the specific constraints refugee women face. Sessions are designed to be compatible with childcare schedules. The cohort model — not solo instruction — is the core delivery mechanism. Mentors include women who built businesses through refugee and immigrant pathways.

None of this eliminates the double barrier. It builds a functional path through it.

31.1% employment is not a statement about refugee women's capability. It is a statement about the systems that have been built — or not built — to support them. The research is clear: when the infrastructure exists, outcomes change.

Sources: PLOS One — Predictors, barriers, and facilitators to refugee women's employment and economic inclusion, 2024; ScienceDirect — Empathy in action: crowdfunding dynamics for female refugee entrepreneurs, 2025; OECD International Migration Outlook 2024