"Aimed at investors and other development practitioners, this toolkit highlights the potential of using finance to impact and empower adolescent girls and young women in emerging markets. The toolkit is based on the work of SPRING and four years of experience in running its accelerator for girls and young women impact ventures in East Africa and South Asia."

"The purpose of the paper is to find the relationship between education and training and performance of women entrepreneurs (WEs). The present study found that entrepreneurial education stimulates women to take up entrepreneurship as a career option."

"The purpose of this document is to provide an insider look at the application of the BalanceD-MERL approach in a program operating in a complex environment. The Women + Water Global Development Alliance is a five-year (2017-2022) collaboration among USAID, Gap, Inc., CARE, Water.org, the Institute for Sustainable Communities and the International Center for Research on Women. Together, these organizations are leveraging their complementary strengths to improve and sustain the health and well-being of women and communities touched by the apparel industry. The BalanceD-MERL consortium delivered a MERL strategy to the Alliance. In this document, the BalanceD-MERL consortium shares their experience of applying the approach and provides key takeaways from the application of the approach. The BalanceDMERL consortium also gives decision-makers, program implementers, and MERL practitioners action–items to undertake to enhance the effectiveness of this approach."

"This study explores how the social entrepreneurship ecosystem can unite to develop an action plan on gender lens incubation and investing for enterprises focused on the low income market segment in India. It takes an international perspective with a geographical focus on India an emerging leader in innovation for the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) and is supported by examples of such innovative high impact, sustainable enterprises."

"Este estudo setorial faz parte de uma série publicada pela ANDE em 2019 que foi projetada para criar uma base de conhecimento comum a partir da qual o setor de Pequenas Empresas em Crescimento (SGB na sigla em inglês) pode trabalhar na esperança de avançar em direção aos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento selecionados. Cada breve resumo destaca como as SGBs podem desempenhar um papel importante nesse progresso. Esta série servirá como ponto de partida para impulsionar a conversa e moldar a estratégia da ANDE em relação a cada uma dessas áreas-chave, com o reconhecimento de que essa não é uma coleção aprofundada da pesquisa/literatura sobre esses tópicos."

"This report brings new findings for consideration by the diverse audience of researchers, policymakers, educators, and practitioners. The ultimate aim is to highlight areas where there are still gaps, challenges, and opportunities, where women entrepreneurs have made significant progress, and how ecosystems influence and are influenced by women entrepreneurs. The findings of this report provide a foundation for guiding future research, policy decision-making, and design of initiatives and programs to enhance growth and development of women's entrepreneurship within context. Overall, this report demonstrates the value women entrepreneurs bring to societies worldwide and suggests areas for improvement in conditions that encourage and support their aspirations."

"Using data on the entire population of businesses registered in the states of California and Massachusetts between 1995 and 2011, we decompose the well-established gender gap in entrepreneurship. We show that female- led ventures are 63 percentage points less likely than male-led ventures to obtain external funding (i.e., venture capital). The most significant portion of the gap (65 percent) stems from gender differences in initial startup orientation, with women being less likely to found ventures that signal growth potential to external investors. However, the residual gap is as much as 35 percent and much of this disparity likely reflects investors' gendered preferences. Consistent with theories of statistical discrimination, the residual gap diminishes significantly when stronger signals of growth are available to investors for comparable female- and male-led ventures or when focal investors appear to be more sophisticated. Finally, conditional on the reception of external funds (i.e., venture capital), women and men are equally likely to achieve exit outcomes, through IPOs or acquisitions."

"This paper studies the aggregate effects of the existing differences between male and female-run firms in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Using data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey and the International Labor Organization (ILO), we show that only about one-fourth of the total firms are run by women and that female-run firms are about three times smaller than male-run firms in LAC. We then extend the theoretical framework in Cuberes and Teignier (2016) to account for these facts and quantify their aggregate effects on productivity and income per capita. In our model, men and women are identical in all aspects except for the fact that some women face barriers to becoming entrepreneurs, which may be a function of their talent. The calibration of our model implies that the barriers that some women face to becoming firm managers depend positively on their managerial talent, which results in female-run firms being smaller than those managed by men in equilibrium. In our baseline simulation, we obtain an output per capita loss due to these gender gaps of 9.4 percent, all of which is due to misallocation of resources and the resulting fall in aggregate productivity. This loss is 1.3 times larger than the one obtained in a framework where barriers to entrepreneurship were assumed to be independent of talent."

"We seek to examine founder gender preferences in the context of equity crowdfunding, which represents a direct counterpart to traditional equity financing and which is a "higher-stakes" context than rewards-based crowdfunding. More specifically, we explore whether founder gender preferences, if they exist, vary based on the gender and the experience of the investor. Through a randomized field experiment, we find that inexperienced female investors are significantly more interested (138%) in ventures with female founders than those with male founders; however, we do not observe founder gender preferences among experienced female investors. For male investors, we do not observe differences in interest in investing based on founder gender or investor experience. We thus confirm that the gender gaps observed in traditional equity funding do not apply to equity crowdfunding. Further, we theorize that the mechanisms proposed in previous research in low-stakes crowdfunding decision contexts, such as the use of founder gender as a heuristic and participation in activism homophily, that drive female investors to prefer female founders may not apply to experienced investors in higher-stakes equity crowdfunding. The results from a follow-up survey of the study participants provide support for our theoretical arguments."

"The Gender Lens Incubation and Acceleration (GLIA) toolkit is an interactive resource, to guide accelerators and incubators (or 'intermediaries') through the journey of uncovering how our activities impact, and are experienced by, different gendered groups. This toolkit will equip us as intermediaries with the mindset, strategies, and frameworks to amend and improve both our organisation and program to increase accessibility and inclusivity of our work by all genders."