THE STATUS OF STATISTICS ON WOMEN AND MEN

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THE STATUS OF STATISTICS ON WOMEN AND MENS
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE UNECE REGION
Workshop on Improving Statistics on SMEs and
Entrepreneurship OECD- Paris 17-19 September 2003

• Costanza Giovannelli, Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir,
  Angela Me
• UN Economic Commission for Europe -
  Statistical Division

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Changing the focus

• From characteristics of enterprises
• to characteristics of people managing/owning the
  enterprises

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The questionnaire

• Questionnaire to National Statistical Offices in
  the ECE region
• Official statistics
• Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME)
• Entrepreneurship NOT only in the context of SME
• Three main sections
• i) availability of selected indicators
• ii) sources and methods
• iii) dissemination

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Why is it important to study entrepreneurship and
gender in SME context?

• More self-employed women are involved in the SME
  sector creating new job and contributing to
  poverty reduction
• Emerging role of women

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Definition of Entrepreneurs

• Owners
• Managers
• Executive directors, central board executives
• more generally
• those who were involved in the establishment of
  the business
• those responsible for its development

Business and Entrepreneurship Survey (Ireland)
an owner, part-owner and/or the principal
manager responsible for the expansion and
strategic development of the business
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Definition of Entrepreneurs

• Lack of common frameworks to define entrepreneurs
  
• Difficult to translate the concept of
  entrepreneurship into statistical measures using
  existing data collections

Studies on entrepreneurship are based on a
assortment of indicators according to the
available sources
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Indicators on Entrepreneurs
Managers
Self-employed
Employers
Own-account workers
Members of Ex. Boards
Owners
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Information can be found in.

• Households
• Status in employment
• Self-employed
• Own-account workers
• Employers
• Occupation
• Managers
• People in supervisory position
• Enterprises
• Owners
• Executive Directors

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Information can be found in.

• Households
• Sex disaggregated data
• Characteristics of the entrepreneur
• No information on type of enterprise
• Difficult to measure owners

• Enterprises
• Information on type of enterprise
• Gender is not always collected
• Registers are not fully reliable in all
  countries
• Registers or surveys may be limited to certain
  types of enterprises
• Not for statistical purposes

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The Availability of Statistical Indicators
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Self-employment caution
Self-employment, employers and own-account
workers women as a percentage of women and men
agricultural sector as a percentage of total
employment, some ECE countries 2001
(a) 2000 Source UNECE Gender Statistics
Database
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Problems and gaps

• Use of several sources
• Lack of comparability, different classifications
• for example in Poland the classification of the
  status in employment used in the enterprise
  survey is different from the one used in the LFS
• Coverage issues
• Registers are of limited use in countries with a
  large informal economy
• In existing sources, the challenge is to have sex
  disaggregated data

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Future challenges in official statistics

• To identify the policy relevant issues of women
  and men entrepreneurs in order to clarify the
  objectives of the data collection
• To reach an agreement on a working definition or
  a common framework on entrepreneurship and other
  relevant key concepts
• To harmonize among countries and within countries
  statistical concepts related to the collection
  and dissemination of data

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Future challenges in official statistics

• To incorporate the gender dimension in the
  collection and dissemination of SME statistics
• To identify expertise and best practices in the
  region, which could be used as a basis for the
  standard ways in which official statistics on
  women and mens entrepreneurship will be
  collected by NSOs in the region