While governments have been reducing barriers to women’s entrepreneurship for decades, women’s entrepreneurship policy initiatives are often fragile – time-limited, small-scale, sparse, symptom-oriented – and not sufficiently underpinned by a genuine vision and framework for women’s entrepreneurship. They can lead to women’s entrepreneurship policies and programmes that are incomplete or ineffective, often because they are not consistent with global policy objectives. Governments can do more to strengthen policy frameworks for women’s entrepreneurship, including by increasing knowledge about the impacts of policy and strengthening engagement with women’s entrepreneurship stakeholders. There is also a need to ensure there are appropriate resources so that policy frameworks are sustainable in the long-term.
Women in inclusive entrepreneurship
The gender gaps in entrepreneurship are persistent and cost economies in missed opportunities for job creation, growth and innovation. These gender gaps are due to a range of obstacles, such as higher self-perceived fear of failure, skills gaps and more restrictive access to finance. Policy needs to do more to cultivate women’s entrepreneurial aspirations, address market failures in the areas of skills and finance, and improve access to networks and support for growth-oriented entrepreneurs.
Key links
Key messages
The use of more contextualised policies and programmes would acknowledge the diversity of women entrepreneurs, reflecting their different motivations, ambitions and needs. This calls for a greater use of tailored measures when appropriate as well as building a more gender inclusive entrepreneurship support infrastructure by increasing resources for women’s entrepreneurship organisations and networks, investing in research on women’s entrepreneurship and reducing gender barriers within mainstream interventions and offer women entrepreneurs direct support.
Women entrepreneurs continue to face greater difficulties in accessing finance to start a business and grow than men due to a range of supply-side issues and demand-side factors. Governments should continue to use, scale up and further develop the suite of traditional policy measures to address persistent barriers faced by women entrepreneurs, including loan guarantees.
It is also important to further explore new approaches to improve access and increase the supply of finance available to women entrepreneurs, including fintech. Moreover, governments could further their efforts to increase the supply of growth financing for high-potential women entrepreneurs and scale up complementary non-financial supports such as leadership and management training.
How do we address the gender gap in entrepreneurship at the OECD?
At the OECD, we:
- Monitor trends and policy developments in the area of women’s entrepreneurship;
- Offer policy analysis and advice on policies and programmes that support women in business creation and self-employment through in-depth reports, policy briefs, workshops, webinars, blogs and rapid policy assessments; and
- Support national, regional and local governments in strengthening the design and implementation of tailored entrepreneurship support for women with tailored analysis and policy recommendations.
Closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship
Millions of “missing” women entrepreneurs
The long-standing gender gaps in entrepreneurship continue to cost economies. Recent estimates from several OECD countries suggest that closing these gender gaps could have a positive economic impact, adding a 6-12% boost in GDP growth. Another way to approximate the size of the gender gap in entrepreneurship is to estimate the number of “missing” entrepreneurs. There could be 24.8 million more women entrepreneurs in the OECD if women participated in early-stage entrepreneurship at the same rate as 30-49 year old men. Moreover, women represented 73% of all “missing” entrepreneurs across the OECD, suggesting that the “missing” entrepreneurs challenge is largely a gender issue.
Inspire more women entrepreneurs
It is important to foster a strong pipeline of women entrepreneurs. An important place to start is by boosting entrepreneurial ambitions and intentions among women as women are less likely to believe they are capable of starting a business and more likely to believe their business will fail. It is also important to address the lack of entrepreneurship skills as less than half of women in OECD countries believe they are capable of starting a business. These gender gaps lead to fewer women pursuing business creation than men ─ women were nearly 30% less likely than men to be involved in starting a business in OECD countries between 2018-22.
Grow women-owned businesses
The gender gap in self-employment decreased in the majority of OECD countries. However, women were 40% less likely than men to be self-employed between 2018 and 2022.
Despite progress being made in closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship in recent years, women continue to face disadvantages and barriers in business creation and self-employment. At current rates, the gender gap in self-employment won’t close until 2086.
Get in touch
For further information, please contact David Halabisky or Helen Shymanski
David Halabisky, Project co-ordinator
Helen Shymanski, Policy Analyst