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.

In Season 6 of What Does It Profit?, Dr. Dawn Carpenter explores dignity at work by stepping inside industries where women are still underestimated and often unwelcome.

In this episode, we meet Aine O'Dwyer, a civil engineer and the CEO of Enovate Engineering. Raised on a dairy farm in Ireland, Aine learned early the value of discipline, perseverance, and hard work. Those lessons carried her across the Atlantic to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she pursued civil engineering while playing college basketball.

Engineering classrooms were still overwhelmingly male, but Aine was undeterred. She built a career from the ground up, beginning as a field engineer and eventually leading major infrastructure projects across the New York region.

Today, her firm helps design and manage the construction of bridges and other critical structures. For Aine, the work is more than technical. Every bridge represents a system carefully designed to endure.

But the bridges she builds are not only made of steel and concrete. They are also bridges of confidence and opportunity for the next generation of women entering engineering.

Aine's story reminds us that economic life is not just about what we build, but about who gets to build it. Because the structures that shape our world are not only physical, they are moral as well.

And every one of them raises the same question: What does it profit?