According to a study carried out in 51 countries and territories by the Global Entrepreneurship Research Association, female entrepreneurs are especially common in middle-income nations like Ecuador, Guatemala, Jordan, and Thailand as well as in developed country Saudi Arabia.
High-income countries in the Americas, for example, Canada, Chile, and the United States, also performed better than their European and East Asian peers. Many developed nations in Europe have very low rates of female entrepreneurs, according to the study, as do some countries in Asia. On the latter continent, lower-income as well as high-income nations are seeing fewer female founders on average.
Entrepreneurial activity in low and middle-income nations is sometimes called necessity-driven entrepreneurship, which can be caused by a lack of formal employment opportunities in a country, while in developed nations, innovation-driven entrepreneurialism coexists with well-developed formal job markets. Yet, within both types of economies, big differences exist between the rates of female entrepreneurs. While 32 percent of adult women are engaged in entrepreneurial activity in Ecuador and around 20 percent are starting their own businesses in Jordan, fewer women are entrepreneurs in other middle-income countries like Egypt (2.6 percent) or China (4.9 percent).
Some European countries fare extraordinarily badly, with Poland (2.3 percent) having the lowest rate of female entrepreneurship in the ranking ahead of aforementioned Egypt and China as well as Romania (3.7 percent) and Hungary (4.9 percent). Compared to other middle-income countries, India only registered a low rate of around 10.3 percent female entrepreneurs - just slightly ahead of Germany and South Korea. However, the gap between the sexes tends to be smaller in developing countries than in developed ones, where 50 to 100 percent more males are entrepreneuers than females.
A closer gap between male and female entrepreneurs can however also point to less equality in the job market. In South Korea, a country with a very traditional corporate culture, female entrepreneurship rates have soared recently as a response to unequal career opportunities for women. This factor could also play a role in traditional Muslim nations, like those in the Gulf, registering more female entrepreneurs.The newly released Women's Entrepreneurship Report by research consortium Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows that men are still slightly ahead globally when it comes to founding and establishing their own businesses, while women have been catching up majorly. The report also shows that women are more likely to focus their businesses on local markets. There is one exception, however. In Central and East Asia, internationally focused startups are in equal parts led by men and women, while those concentrating on local markets are led by men 57 percent of the time.
This is in contrast to other world regions, where women have reached some parity when tackling local markets but lag behind more in terms of internationally focused startups. In the Middle East and Africa as well as in North America, international market startups were led by men 64 percent and 66 percent of the time, respectively, in 2023. The same number was 60 percent in Europe as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.
In developing regions, early-stage entrepreneurial activity focuses much less on international markets. While in Latin America, local markets reign supreme, catapulting women into the spotlight among entrepreneurs, Central and East Asia as well as the Middle East and Africa focus on national markets first and local markets second, giving women a window to excel in the less crowded international space. Chinese women lead this push with 73 percent of entrepreneurs focused internationally being female. The same phenomenon is observable in Iran, where 61 percent of women entrepreneurs dominate the international market.
Chinese women have been reported to set up more online businesses than Chinese men. With China's role in the international consumer goods market that has been moving towards direct exports recently, women have claimed their spot in international startups, for example from the sectors of clothing or cosmetics. While most startups remain small, some of the world's richest self-made women have earned fortunes in China by producing and exporting more expensive cosmetics products like facial fillers, collagen, or hyaluronic acid to the world.
Differences persist between female and male founders in terms of company size, where men more often stated they would hire more people, as well as the type of company founded. Here, women were overrepresented in the fields of wholesale retail, government, and social services. Women were also still 50 percent more likely than men to quit their startup for family or personal reasons.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports that since 2001-2005, the share of women participating in entrepreneurial activity - that means founding and establishing their own business for the first 3.5 years - has risen in 30 continuously studied countries from an average of 6.1 percent to 10.4 percent by 2021-2023. For comparison, while in 2023, 10.9 percent of women in 45 countries and territories were entrepreneurs, this number was 13.8 percent for men.
