There's nothing wrong with coming here to ask serious questions.
You want to know more ask women who race... I'm a cat 3 out here in the PNW. I'm 40, so I have no aspirations to make a career out of it, but I can tell you what I know about the racing world. The pros have all the same problems most any pro women's sports encounter. It's thought that for the most part, women's sports don't have the following to support television broadcast, therefore there are fewer sponsors, with fewer dollars, etc. etc.... Most of the women that I know who race pro have a side career... You can barely get your expenses covered as a pro woman cyclist, much less make a living at it. This is unfortunately true even to the top ranks. But then it all starts lower down....
We're very lucky up here to have a large cycling and racing community. We have more opportunity than most other places. We actually have separated women's cat 4 fields, while in most places all the women still race together. This really creates a disincentive for women to race, unless they are particularly strong right out of the gate. Many people try a few races, get dropped right away and that's it for them. The whole idea of having to race with the higher category women scares some people off before they ever even get to the point of trying.
Convincing promoters to separate out the women is certainly a challenge. They have a set amount of time they can run their race in and a certain number of fields that they can run. They look at it as why should I run a women's 4 field that might get 25 riders, when I can run a Master's 40+ field that will fill? It's a money thing for them, but for us it's a chicken and egg problem - if you don't create the opportunities for women to race in a setting that isn't intimidating, they wont do it. We've been lucky enough here to have the numbers to really support the beginner women- most of our races have cat 4 fields and we've even been able to have some separate cat 3 races. It takes a lot of hard work though and women who will get out there and advocate hard. We have a cat 4 and cat 3 prize series that several of our veteran women races work extremely hard at organizing, to encourage women to be out racing. It's a help to use it with promoters to convince them that if they allow their race to be a series race that it will help attendance and justify the separated fields.
Hope that gives you some food for thought. If you have specific questions, I'd be happy to try to answer in more depth.