Gender differences in business performance: evidence from Kenya and South Africa

Tesfaye T. Lemma (), Tendai Gwatidzo and Mthokozisi Mlilo
Additional contact information
Tesfaye T. Lemma: Towson University

Small Business Economics, 2023, vol. 60, issue 2, No 9, 614 pages

Abstract: Abstract The study investigates the performance gap between female-owned enterprises (FOEs) and their male-owned (MOEs) peers, using data obtained from 1,522 firms included in the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) on Kenya and South Africa. We find that FOEs underperform their MOE counterparts and that the performance differential in both countries is driven by the joint effect of gendered differences in endowments and returns on endowments. We also find that differences in returns on endowments contribute the largest gendered performance gap in both countries. Our findings not only corroborate the “female underperformance hypothesis”, but also point to the dominance of the social feminist theory in providing explanation for the observed gendered performance gap in both countries. The findings imply that efforts aimed at equalizing opportunities or removing structural barriers to women entrepreneurship would lead to reductions in the observed gendered performance gap; those targeted at reshaping social structures would have even stronger impact in terms of cutting the performance differential, in both countries.

Keywords: Gender of business owners; Women entrepreneurship; Structural barriers; Feminist theories; Business performance; Emerging economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 J16 J22 L25 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-022-00605-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:60:y:2023:i:2:d:10.1007_s11187-022-00605-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-022-00605-w

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().