Women in innovative start-ups and regional inclusiveness: ‘green’ and socially-responsible companies

Alessandra Colombelli, Anna D’Ambrosio and Chiara Ravetti

Regional Studies, 2025, vol. 59, issue 1, 2340999

Abstract: We explore the link between women in business decision-making roles, regional gender equality in the workforce and start-up sustainability. We employ unique administrative data on innovative start-ups in Italy and implement a novel crawler-based semantic search of start-ups’ websites to identify ‘green’ firms. Our findings on high-tech innovative start-ups confirm established evidence in the female entrepreneurship literature: greater shares of women in decision-making roles increase the probability of a social focus but decrease the likelihood of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-intensive green energy objectives. Instead, the board gender composition does not correlate with non-energy ‘green’ objectives. Non-energy ‘green’ firms emerge more in gender-equal regions, while social start-ups develop where women have fewer employment opportunities.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2340999

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