Childcare, COVID-19 and Female Firm Exit : Impact of COVID-19 School Closure Policies on Global Gender Gaps in Business Outcomes
This paper estimates the impact of a large negative childcare shock on gender gaps in entrepreneurship using the shock created by national COVID-19 school closure policies. The paper leverages a unique data set of monthly enterprise data collected...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099801504202219533/IDU09a0b48500e81804d330adf50b3fd02049079 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37328 |
| Summary: | This paper estimates the impact of a
large negative childcare shock on gender gaps in
entrepreneurship using the shock created by national
COVID-19 school closure policies. The paper leverages a
unique data set of monthly enterprise data collected from a
repeated cross-section of business owners across 50
countries via Facebook throughout 2020 and in 2021. The
paper shows that, globally, female-led firms were, on
average, 4 percentage points more likely to close their
business and experienced larger revenue declines than
male-led firms during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (male
firms closed at a rate of 17 percent in 2020, and 12 percent
in 2021). The gender gap in firm closures persisted into
2021. The closing of schools, a key part of the care
infrastructure, led to higher business closures, and women
with children were more likely to close their business in
response to a school closure policy than men with children.
Female entrepreneurs were found to take on a greater share
of the increase in the domestic and care work burden than
male entrepreneurs. Finally, the paper finds that women
entrepreneurs in societies with more conservative norms with
respect to gender equality were significantly more likely to
close their business and increase the time spent on domestic
and care responsibilities in response to a school closure
policy, relative to women in more liberal societies. The
paper provides global evidence of a motherhood penalty and
childcare constraint to help explain gender inequalities in
an entrepreneurship context. |
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