Women Entrepreneurs Leading the Way to More and Better Jobs for Women

Overview & Synopsis

This brief explores the role of women entrepreneurs in job creation, focusing on how women‑owned firms contribute to women’s employment. Using data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) covering formally registered firms across 168 economies over 19 years, the analysis shows that women remain systematically underrepresented as entrepreneurs, top managers, and workers in formal firms with five or more workers. Women‑owned firms play a critical role in expanding women’s formal employment, hiring about 20 percentage points more women in permanent full‑time positions than men‑owned firms across income groups, firm sizes, sectors, and regions. In low‑income economies, this gap is even more pronounced, with women‑owned firms hiring about twice the share of women compared to men‑owned firms. This pattern may partly reflect women’s concentration in sectors that employ more women, but it persists across all sectors. However, structural barriers such as limited access to finance, training, and markets often constrain women’s business performance and job growth, resulting in fewer net jobs per firm compared to men‑owned firms. These findings suggest that gender gaps in job creation reflect structural features of labor markets, and that removing barriers to women’s entrepreneurship could unlock additional job growth while expanding women’s access to full‑time employment.