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The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women-Led Businesses

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  • Torres,Jesica
  • Maduko,Franklin Okechukwu
  • Gaddis,Isis
  • Iacovone,Leonardo
  • Beegle,Kathleen G.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck businesses across the globe with unprecedented impacts. Theworld economy has been hit hard and firms have experienced a myriad of challenges, but these challenges have beenheterogeneous across firms. This paper examines one important dimension of this heterogeneity: the differentialeffect of the pandemic on women-led and men-led businesses. The paper exploits a unique sample of close to 40,000 mainlyformal businesses from 49 countries covering the months between April and September 2020. The findings show thatwomen-led micro-businesses, women-led businesses in the hospitality industry, and women-led businesses in countriesmore severely affected by the COVID-19 shock were disproportionately hit compared with businesses led by men.At the same time, women-led micro-firms were markedly more likely to report increasing the use of digital platforms,but less likely to invest in software, equipment, or digital solutions. Finally, the findings also show that women-ledbusinesses were less likely to have received some form of public support although they have been hit harder in somedomains. In a crisis of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence tracing the impact of the shock in atimely fashion is desperately needed to help inform the design of policy interventions. This real-time glimpse intowomen-led businesses fills this need for robust and policy-relevant evidence, and due to the large countrycoverage of the data, it is possible to identify patterns that extend beyond any one country, region, or sector, butat the cost of some granularity for testing more complex economic theories.

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  • Torres,Jesica & Maduko,Franklin Okechukwu & Gaddis,Isis & Iacovone,Leonardo & Beegle,Kathleen G., 2021. "The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women-Led Businesses," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9817, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9817
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    Cited by:

    1. Amanda J. Felkey & Dimitra Papadovasilaki, 2023. "Gender Code-Switching in Economics and Finance," Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE), vol. 7(1), pages 43-50, November.
    2. Kamaha Njiwa, Marinette & Atif, Muhammad & Arshad, Muhammad & Mirza, Nawazish, 2023. "The impact of female dominance on business resilience: A technology adoption perspective," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).
    3. Oluwasheyi Oladipo & Katarzyna Platt & Hyoung Suk Shim, 2023. "Female entrepreneurs managing from home," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 61(2), pages 447-464, August.

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