Nicole Chaudry, founder and CEO of WorldKids® School, started her preschool company in a converted corner of her own house in Washington. This month she was named to Franchise Dictionary Magazine’s 2026 Women of Wonder list one of 50 women recognized for leading franchise brands. It’s her second year in a row on the list.
The list honors women who build franchise systems. Far more women buy into those systems as owners.
What is Franchise Dictionary Magazine’s Women of Wonder list?
The Women of Wonder (WoW) list is an annual feature from FranServe and Franchise Dictionary Magazine, a national digital publication with nearly 450,000 readers, written for people considering buying a franchise. The October 2026 issue went live Oct. 1. Through FranServe’s Fran-Aid initiative, the magazine will donate proceeds from the issue to Susan G. Komen.
Alesia Visconti, CEO of FranServe and Franchise Dictionary Magazine, said in a statement on this year’s honorees: “We love seeing more women in the franchise space.”
Chaudry’s entry credits her with building WorldKids into an organization that supports children, families and educators, and with creating jobs and leadership roles for women. A full-page profile in the same issue, “Growing Beyond Boundaries,” tells the story of how a European upbringing became a preschool franchise.
How many franchise owners in the U.S. are women?
A little more than a quarter, by the most recent count. Guidant Financial’s 2026 Franchise Trends report found that women made up 28.0% of the franchise owners it surveyed this year, up from 25.7% in 2025. The number moves from year to year: Franchise Dictionary Magazine reported in 2023 that Guidant then put women at 29% of franchise owners. Guidant also surveys only its own clients, so its figures describe a slice of the market rather than a census.
The International Franchise Association’s most recent annual franchisee survey, run with the research firm FRANdata, polled more than 1,400 franchisees in 2024 and didn’t report owners by gender. What holds steady across Guidant’s surveys is that franchising draws women at a higher rate than small business overall: this year, women were 24.7% of Guidant’s full client base, against 28.0% of its franchise owners.
The women who do own franchises tend to stay and expand. Franchise Business Review’s latest women-in-franchising research, drawn from nearly 8,550 female franchise owners, reports that 88% enjoy operating their business. Women with at least two years in business averaged $109,000 in annual income, and 36% of respondents own more than one unit. Among all the franchisees in the IFA’s 2024 survey, 43% were multi-unit owners. The two surveys sample different people, so the gap is a rough comparison, but it puts women owners within about seven points of the industry-wide figure.
In Guidant’s 2025 Women in Business report, the most common reason women gave for becoming owners was wanting to be their own boss (39%), followed by dissatisfaction with corporate America (29%) and pursuing a passion or idea (26%). Chaudry fits the third group. She spent years in corporate management and recruiting, and the company grew out of a school she wanted for her son.
The WoW list’s honorees are a different group: founders, CEOs, presidents and COOs, the people who run the franchisor and design the system owners buy into.
Why does childcare make the women-in-franchising question so concrete?
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported in June 2024 that 95% of childcare workers are women. The median hourly wage for the occupation was $14.60 in 2023, more than a third below the median across all jobs, and childcare employment was still 9% below its pre-pandemic level at the end of 2023. Pay is improving from that low base: after inflation, the occupation’s median wage rose 5.5% from 2019 to 2023, against 1.7% for all jobs.
So a childcare franchise is a women-in-business story twice over. The founder may be a woman, the owners often are, and nearly everyone in the classroom is.
For Chaudry, hiring starts with language. WorldKids teaches in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, with the target language used as the classroom language from infancy onward, which means the schools need fluent speakers who also want to work with young children. Walking into one, she said, is like walking into a different country: one teacher speaks to the children only in Mandarin, another only in Spanish, and the songs, art, counting and handwashing all happen in those languages.
“They almost don’t know they’re learning another language,” Chaudry said.
In a September 2026 interview, she described who tends to apply.
“We have seen a lot of single parents coming to us, a lot of mothers that want to be with their children,” Chaudry said. Those new hires, she added, “can take classes through WorldKids and start with us and then work on their education.”
She pointed out that early childhood education is often an entry point into teaching, without the certification requirements of elementary or middle school. Many people already working in the field speak Spanish, Mandarin or another language at home, even when they’ve been teaching in English.
“So now we’re allowing them to teach in the native language, to bring their culture and tradition into our program,” she said. “It also builds community.”
Hiring by word of mouth has followed. Teachers recruit teachers the way families recruit families, and Chaudry said that shared language helps hold a school’s staff together.
How did Nicole Chaudry start WorldKids School?
Chaudry grew up in Germany, in a neighborhood where Italian, Arabic, Turkish and German were all spoken on the same block. When she moved to the United States about 21 years ago and started looking for a preschool for her son in the Seattle area, she couldn’t find the mix of early childhood curriculum and language immersion she’d grown up with.
She had a business background, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s management program, and no experience running a school. She researched Washington’s licensing rules, got her state license, and converted part of her home into a classroom. Families found her through parent blogs and local news sites.
“Pretty much in the first three months, we had a wait list already,” she said.
The waitlist pushed the program out of her house. She earned certifications in evening classes and later a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington while running the schools. Today WorldKids has schools across Washington and in San Jose, Calif., is now enrolling in North Raleigh, N.C., and has locations coming soon in Malvern, Pa.; Naperville, Ill.; and Columbus, Ohio.
What does Nicole Chaudry look for in a franchise partner?
She tries to meet every prospective owner herself, at least for one call. The first filter is whether they care about the classroom as much as the business.
“I want them to go into the classroom and say, I could see my child here. I could see my nephew here,” Chaudry said. “Any child that is close to my heart would be happy in this program.”
The second is whether they’ll follow the system. WorldKids, founded in January 2015, spent nearly a decade opening schools before it began franchising in July 2024, and Chaudry wants owners who will use that playbook instead of rebuilding it. The third is creativity. She wants partners who bring their own ideas to the table.
Her profile in Franchise Dictionary Magazine makes the same case. “The most successful franchisees are those who embrace the company’s proven systems while remaining committed to continuous learning,” she told the magazine.
Owners walk into a building that used to be a medical office or a restaurant and can’t yet picture a school in it. She works alongside them through property, licensing and buildout.
“I pretty much had franchise partners, school operators, on opening day, they’re in tears,” she said. What moves them, in her telling, is that they’re replicating something that mattered to her, and “they want to build legacy for themselves and their children.”
What does recognition like this mean for a growing franchise brand?
For prospective owners, a list like WoW is a signal about who is running the system they’d be buying into. Franchise Dictionary Magazine’s readers are mostly people still deciding, and the founder’s priorities shape what they’d be signing up for.
“Success isn’t defined by the number of schools we open but by the generations of children, families and communities whose lives are changed because of WorldKids,” Chaudry told the magazine.
She said something similar about pace when asked where WorldKids goes next. “It’s not about growing fast or going in all the states we can,” Chaudry said. “It’s really about who is representing us and how do we do this right without ever forgetting the core of our program.”
Women already hold more than a quarter of franchise ownership by Guidant’s count, and more of them will be making that kind of call as founders, too. Childcare, where women already do nearly all the work, is one of the places where it shows first.
