Girl Power: Creating More with Less

Studies show that women are very productive employees, but that as business owners, compared to their male counterparts, they run companies that earn less, grow at a lesser rate, and employ a smaller number of employees. One of the explanations for this discrepancy argues that indicators such as sales, turnover or profit do not measure performance adequately because they are dependent on the size of the firm. Since women often make a conscious decision to keep their companies small, these performance measures may not adequately represent women-owned businesses. We study a panel of micro firms across all industries, from three EU countries of comparable size (Croatia, Slovenia, and Slovakia) in the period 2010 – 2019. Results indicate that female-owned firms have higher values of both turnover per asset and value added per asset. Additionally, results suggest that during recession years, female-led firms show a degree of resilience to these adverse effects, and they manage to increase their turnover per asset by 3 to 4 percent on average, compared to male-led firms. We conclude that although women-owned micro firms tend to have less resources compared to men’s, women can create larger output per asset, suggesting capability to combine those resources in a very effective way.