Understanding Women's Lower Participation than Men as Workers, Top Managers, and Owners in Private Firms in the EU-27 Countries

This Brief examines issues related to women's participation as workers, top managers, and owners of private firms in 27 European Union countries (EU-27), using the rich database of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. The analysis focuses on EU regions varying between about 800,000 and 3 million inhabitants (NUTS2-level groupings). Overall, women's participation as workers, top managers, and firm owners is statistically significantly less than that of men. Surprisingly, richer NUTS2 regions experience a larger gender gap favoring men in employment, top manager positions, and firm ownership. Another worrying feature is that relative to men, women workers tend to be concentrated in firms that are less productive and pay low wages. Thus, closing gender gaps in income requires not just more jobs but also better quality of jobs for women. Having a woman as the top manager of the firm is associated with a higher share of women workers in the firm, but this effect is much stronger when the firm initially has a relatively high share of women workers. A gender gap also exists in labor productivity, which is lower for women-run firms than men-run firms, and for firms with higher women's ownership. These gaps in labor productivity are much larger at lower quantiles of labor productivity, implying the presence of sticky floors but not necessarily glass ceilings in the EU-27 countries. The Brief identifies some of the factors that are correlated with the average gender labor productivity gap and estimates their contribution to the gap. There is no systematic difference in the level of constraints, including access to finance, faced by men-run versus women-run firms and/or by firms at different levels of women's ownership