In 2024, the share of women on the top decision-making boards of the largest companies in Germany increased. A solid 19 percent of all executive board members at the 200 largest companies are now women, and almost 26 percent of members at the 40 largest listed companies are women. The financial...

In the current era, women are often recognized as successful entrepreneurs due to their innovative capabilities and strong drive for robust economic growth. Their effective role in job creation, family income etc. is now recognized at an international level. Given the significant contribution,...

Women entrepreneurs are increasingly recognised as pivotal contributors to economic growth, poverty alleviation, and employment generation, particularly in developing economies like South Africa. This study explores the contributing and constraining factors that shape the future of women's...

Purpose - This paper aims to explore the motivations behind women in a developing South Asian country - Sri Lanka - to embark on entrepreneurship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which is a doubly masculine hegemony operating within a culturally nuanced gendered...

Purpose - This paper addresses the issue of the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions within the information and communication technology (ICT) and engineering fields. The study examines the complex issue of vertical segregation and gender equality by exploring the barriers that...

Despite progress made in recent years towards more gender balance in political representation, this goal has not been reached yet. Multidimensional indices and scoreboards are useful to keep track of progress and set backs, and identify areas for improvement. The Composite Indicators and...

Purpose: Social media has become a significant catalyst for entrepreneurship in the Middle East, particularly for women. Considering the limited research conducted to understand the factors influencing social media adoption in conservative societies such as Qatar, this study aims to examine the...

Does electing female politicians increase women’s political representation? Using a difference-in-differences design on a comprehensive cross-national dataset, we find that the first election of a female incumbent systematically increases the share of women in government. To address selection...

This paper investigates how board gender diversity (BGD) impacts information asymmetry (IA) and investment efficiency (IE), in addition to the moderating role of board gender diversity on the nexus between information asymmetry and investment efficiency in Egypt, motivated by the unclear lens...

Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are important for economic growth and development. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to psychological characteristics such as personality characteristics as factors for women entrepreneurship in emerging economies. This study aims to investigate the...

Women entrepreneurs in the Middle Eastern region, particularly in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), face several challenges (e.g., cultural) coupled with the recent transformation of the digital economy. This issue poses a significant challenge for financing the business operations. Thus, this...

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...

Access to finance and equal economic opportunities are crucial for female entrepreneurs, fostering business growth and economic participation. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders involved in the legal reform processes, this Brief examines how Sierra Leone made strides in its reform...

In Colombia, women represent 65% of the teacher workforce but only 34% of school principals, reflecting a significant gender gap in leadership. This study examines two centralized principal selection processes implemented by Colombias National Civil Service Commission: the 2016 nationwide...

The gender wage gap rises with experience. To what extent do firm policies mediate this rise? We use administrative data from Italy to identify workers' first jobs and compute wage growth over the next 5 years. We then decompose the contribution of first employers to the rise in the gender wage...

This paper explores how female political leaders impact environmental outcomes and climate change policy actions using data from mixed-gender mayoral races in Brazil. We rely on a Regression Discontinuity design that compares municipalities where women narrowly won the election with those where...

This paper shows that exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence increases women's entry and performance in entrepreneurship and improves the allocation of talent in the economy. Using population-wide registry data from Denmark, we exploit idiosyncratic within-school, cross-cohort variation in...

Women face many barriers to accessing and using the Internet. As a result, despite the rapid global spread of mobile Internet, women all over the world are less likely to participate in the digital economy than men. In fact, women are 15 percent less likely than men to use mobile Internet,...

The World Bank Group's Women, Business and the Law (WBL) is a global benchmarking project that provides comprehensive and comparable data on how laws, regulations, and policies affect women's economic opportunities and private sector development in 190 economies. It is housed in the World Bank's...

This study explores the unique realm of women's entrepreneurial leadership within Stewart's role demands-constraint-choice in Greece. This brings to light the underrepresented role of women entrepreneurs in the country and sets out to fill the literature gap by exploring their distinct...

Despite the massive incorporation of women into the labor market, equal pay for equal work remains a challenge. This article analyzes the influence of gender diversity in management positions on the gender wage gap (GWG) throughout the entire pay scale in Spain. The results show the existence of...

The gender wage gap rises with experience. To what extent do firm policies mediate this rise? We use administrative data from Italy to identify workers' first jobs and compute wage growth over the next 5 years. We then decompose the contribution of first employers to the rise in the gender wage...

We study whether gender-based favoritism impedes women’s career progression using data from a European multinational corporation. Leveraging manager reassignments, we show that manager gender does not affect gender differences, neither in wage growth nor in promotion rates. Remarkably, this...

This paper examines the effect of board gender diversity on bank risk. The empirical analysis is conducted using 21 sample Kenyan commercial banks during the period 2010-2022 in a panel regression framework. Two key results are documented: first, that the share of women in Kenyan bank boards is...