"This issue brief is a part of the series formulated by Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs’ (ANDE) India chapter. It aims to contextualize the findings and strategy outlined in ANDE’s global gender issue brief, for India, and to create a knowledge base connecting our urgent issues and the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector at a regional level. This brief is a starting point for conversations on gender equality and is meant to help shape ANDE India’s strategy for the region."

"Gender equality and female empowerment play a key role in achieving effective and sustainable development outcomes. ACDI/VOCA's GenderFirst approach enables an organization's staff and partners to identify and prioritize program interventions with the most potential to reduce gender equality gaps in households, communities and markets. Through this framework, ACDI/VOCA focuses on reducing gender-based constraints, improving social dynamics, and creating environments in which all people can thrive, while ensuring that activities "do no harm" to participants. GenderFirst tools and resources can be adapted based on program objectives and customized to address the unique needs of communities, taking context-specific dynamics and realities into consideration."

"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."

"This report proposes actions that can be taken by ASEAN Governments and key stakeholders to address the constraints facing women entrepreneurs. Two key levers for change are highlighted. These are greater access to and use of innovative technologies, especially those made available through the ICT revolution; and creative approaches to making finance and credit available to women entrepreneurs. As well as being critical in their own right, these two levers also contribute to unlocking progress in other key areas, such as education and training, access to business support and networks and opening market opportunities."

"Does the lack of peers contribute to the observed gender gap in entrepreneurial success? A random sample of customers of India's largest women's bank was offered two days of business counseling, and a random subsample was invited to attend with a friend. The intervention significantly increased participants' business activity, but only if they were trained with a friend. Those trained with a friend were more likely to have taken out business loans, were less likely to be housewives, and reported increased business activity and higher household income, with stronger impacts among women subject to social norms that restrict female mobility."

"With the growing recognition of women entrepreneurs’ contribution to economic growth, there is need to understand the state of their operations in India. A country-level diagnostic of the demand and supply of finance for women-owned Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises is essential to drawing up country specific strategies to improve their access to finance. This report aims to assess the financing gap through a hybrid approach, including both secondary estimation and primary data collection, and identify the key characteristics of women-owned businesses, their need for financial and non-financial services, their uptake of financial products and the barriers to their access. Subsequently, key areas of focus have been identified that will help improve women entrepreneurs' access to finance."

"Gender discrimination in Latin American societies significantly reduces the effective participation of women in the development of new businesses; therefore, it limits their possibilities for professional advancement, as well as development opportunities for their families. In an even broader context, inequality prevents women from efficiently contributing to business development in countries of the region. The possibilities of undertaking new ventures are diminished by this reality. Most of the women surveyed for this study mentioned that they have suffered discrimination while doing business because of their gender. In fact, the results of this research paper show that women perceive greater inequality in opportunities to create companies and face more barriers in accessing resources, mainly financial ones, to develop their enterprises. These barriers have a negative effect on the outcomes and growth prospects of businesses created by women. Indeed, they prevent women, who represent more than 50% of the population, from efficiently contributing to the creation of wealth and jobs in Latin American countries."