A comparison of the performance of majority female-owned and majority male-owned small and medium-sized enterprises

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of majority gender ownership on the following measures of enterprise performance: sales per employee, profit per employee, employment, innovation, ratio of authorised to requested debt financing and interest rate on debt financing. Using Statistics Canada's Survey on Financing and Growth of Small and Medium Enterprises waves of 2011 2014, as well as administrative data from Statistics Canada's Linkable File Environment, we find that gender affected all measures of enterprise performance in 2011, whereas only sales per employee and employment were affected in 2014. In 2011, majority female-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) had lower profit per employee than majority male-owned SMEs; they were more likely to be innovative than majority male-owned SMEs; they had lower ratio of authorised to requested debt financing than majority male-owned SMEs; and they also faced higher interest rate on debt financing than majority male-owned SMEs.

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