This report aims to provide momentum on discussions about the design, delivery, scope and effectiveness of women-focused entrepreneurship policies and the gendered implications of mainstream policies and programmes. This work also identifies limitations with current policy approaches and points the way to more effective policy.
The report highlights long-standing issues that policy makers need to address to better support and promote women’s entrepreneurship. Many of these issues have been underlined and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which erupted during the preparation of this report. Governments have attempted to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus with measures that have restricted economic and social activities, with severe consequences for many entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs have been hit harder than other entrepreneurs, in part reflecting the fact that women entrepreneurs are more likely to be operating businesses in the service sectors. Women are also disproportionately impacted by isolating at home with family measures. In addition, they often have greater difficulties accessing emergency liquidity measures because their businesses do not meet threshold criteria or are involved in ineligible activities. They are also less likely to use external finance, so government credit extensions and suspensions of payments to entrepreneurs have had less impact. Collectively, these issues threaten to reverse the progress that has been made in closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship over the past several decades.
The report presents a collection of 27 policy insight notes on women’s entrepreneurship policy that were prepared by members of the Global Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy Research Project (Global WEP – www.globalwep.org) – a network of established researchers from over 30 counties – in collaboration with the OECD. This partnership leverages the knowledge, experience and perspectives of the individual country-based scholars who prepared the collection of policy insight notes. While the collection of policy insight notes has been reviewed by the OECD Working Party on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, the notes were prepared by independent researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OECD or its Member Countries.