Gender and Entrepreneurship

1
Gender and Entrepreneurship

• Workshop
• Capacity Building for Implementation of the GAP
  in ECA
• by
• Sarosh Sattar
• Senior Economist
• October 23, 2008

2
Outline

• How to think about entrepreneurship?
• Why care about entrepreneurship?
• Definition
• Literature on entrepreneurship
• Some basic questions for the ECA region
• Some preliminary findings

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Why care about entrepreneurship?

• Entrepreneurship
• contributes to economic growth and leaps in human
  progress
• offers potential of greater wealth and upward
  mobility
• provides an alternative to wage employment

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Defining entrepreneurship

• Many definitions
• Anyone who is working for themselves and retains
  profits
• Anyone who owns an enterprise with workers
• Anyone who owns an enterprise with workers for at
  least 1-3 years

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Literature on entrepreneurship
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Some relevant questions on entrepreneurship

• Can household characteristics explain why women
  are less likely to be self-employed than men?
• Are households maximizing welfare through risk
  mitigation policies?
• Do women face different constraints to
  entrepreneurship than men?
• Are women harassed more than men?
• Are women more averse to paying bribes than men?
• Are legal or illegal hurdles too costly for
  womens time?
• Do female-owned firms perform comparably to
  male-owned firms?

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Preliminary Findings

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Fewer women entrepreneurs and self-employed
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Women run smaller operations
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Main Findings on Firm size

• Significant gender bias in firm size ( of
  employees) against women
• Secondary education is important for women,
  positively correlated with the firm size
• Women face red tape barriers, for them firm size
  is significant and positively related with paying
  bribe
• Being in a civic group does not help women having
  a larger firm compared to men
• Being employed in the same field where they got
  formal training does not help women having a
  larger firm compared to men
• Women tend to have own larger firms in high
  income regions

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BEEPS data on formal enterprises show that

• Women owned firms are
• smaller scaled operations in terms of sales
  revenues
• generate more profit per unit of sales revenue
• have higher returns to scale which means that
  women would gain more from increasing their firm
  size
• This could be because women are
• capital constrained
• concentrated in industries with small firm size

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Some questions

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Interesting questions

• Why do women concentrate in certain sectors
  (services rather than manufacturing)?
• Is the capital constraint self-imposed or does it
  reflect bias in the financial system?
• Do lower entrepreneurship rates among women
  reflect personal choice or economic constraints?
• What encourages women to take the step into
  entrepreneurship?