In this episode of What Does It Profit?, Dr. Dawn Carpenter brings you inside the death care industry with Doris Amen and Alexandra Mosca, two New York funeral directors who have spent decades working with the dead and bereaved in an industry that once told them they didn't belong.

Today, women make up just 15 to 20 percent of funeral directors. The numbers are still small, but they are growing. Women aren't just entering the profession. They're reclaiming their role in death work and reshaping what it looks like.

In this episode of What Does It Profit?, Dr. Dawn Carpenter explores what happens when a business begins with a simple question. Where do people go to belong?

More women are starting businesses than ever before. Yet ownership does not always mean access. Women still face barriers to capital, growth, and recognition. In spaces like game store ownership, those gaps are even more visible.

Whitney Wolfe did not set out to become an entrepreneur. She set out to create a place where people could gather, connect, and feel at ease. That idea became Last Place on Earth, a Brooklyn game store that opened just as the world shut down. Through uncertainty and reinvention, she built a thriving community. Then she did it again with Third Place from the Sun.

This is a story about more than games. It is about how connection creates value. It is about building spaces where people are invited in, not kept out.

Because the strongest businesses are not only places where people spend. They are places where people belong.

A board game may look simple. A set of pieces. A set of rules. A way to win. But every game is a system. It teaches us what to value, how to compete, and what success looks like.

In this episode of What Does It Profit?, we follow the unexpected journey of Elizabeth Hargrave, a health policy consultant turned award-winning game designer, whose hit board game Wingspan reshaped an entire industry. What began as a simple idea, a game about birds, became one of the most successful and celebrated board games of all time, selling over two million copies and opening the door for more women in game design.

But this story is about more than one game. It's about who gets to design systems and whose ideas shape the rules we all live by. In an industry where women create fewer than one percent of games, Hargrave's success signals both how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

From early pioneers like Elizabeth Magie, the creator of The Landlord's Game (the anti-capitalist precursor to Monopoly), to today's emerging designers, women have always been part of this story, even when they were written out of it.

This episode asks a deeper question at the heart of work and economic life: not just who plays the game, but who designs it. Because when new voices shape the rules, the game itself begins to change.