Supporting Growth-Oriented Women Entrepreneurs

Abstract

In recent years, support programs for
 women entrepreneurs have gained traction and prominence as a
 means to create jobs and boost productivity at the national
 and regional levels. However, disparities in initial
 resource endowments of male and female-led firms, sector
 sorting into low productivity activities, social norms, and
 institutional arrangements, constrain the growth of
 female-led enterprises. This note reviews the outcomes of
 programs supporting female growth entrepreneurs and draws
 lessons from available evidence to inform the design of more
 effective programs. The review shows that most programs are
 primarily geared toward microenterprises, making it
 difficult to draw conclusions about program design for
 growth-oriented entrepreneurs, but some early findings point
 the way forward. Management practices appear to improve as a
 result of business education, but there is little robust
 evidence to prove that support programs lead to significant
 improvements in business performance outcomes. Furthermore,
 in programs with both male and female participants, firm
 performance improves in some cases for male-led firms only,
 not for female-led firms. The note concludes by suggesting
 the need for more experimentation in the design and delivery
 of services and a new focus on strengthening the engendering
 of support programs to more specifically address
 gender-specific constraints such as social norms,
 entrepreneurial preferences, and institutional arrangements,
 changing public discourse, and paying more attention to
 factors that induce female entrepreneurs to diversify into
 higher value-added activities. Offering mentoring,
 networking, and other consulting services, in addition to
 education on basic business practices and strengthening
 critical areas such as gender-specific content, can
 potentially increase the effectiveness of these programs.