of Facebook’s 2020 Future of Business Survey were more than twice as likely as male business leaders (23% vs 11%) to spend six hours or more on unpaid work per day, i.e. caring for family members and other domestic work. In addition, they were 10 percentage points more likely to report that these unpaid activities interfered with their paid work (Facebook et al., 2020). There are well-documented pre-existing constraints which are not necessarily in the direct domain of the firm but matter for firm performance and which the pandemic has exacerbated. These include, for example, women’s disproportionate share of unpaid care workload as well as mobility limitations and lack of access to digital technology (De Paz Nieves et al., 2021).

Arguably, while gender gaps in enterprise performance are well documented, there is far less conclusive evidence on how these gaps evolve during times of economic crisis. A few studies argue that gender gaps in enterprise performance and access to finance worsened in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, mostly in the context of developed and transition economies. Ahmed et al. (2020) show that women-led firms in Europe and Central Asia were more likely than men-led firms to exit the market between 2008 and 2009, even controlling for firm characteristics. Among businesses that managed to stay in business, the short-term impacts did not differ systematically for women- vs men-led firms, but women-led businesses experienced a larger decrease in net sales in the long term, i.e. approximately two years into the crisis. Cesaroni et al. (2013) use data from a Credit Registry at the Bank of Italy to show that women-owned firms faced a more pronounced credit contraction than firms owned by men between 2007 and 2009, when liquidity was tight. Similarly, Thébaud and Sharkey (2016) show that women-led firms in the United States were more likely than men-led firms to experience difficulties in acquiring funding when lending tightened in 2009 and 2010. In other contexts, however, women-led firms appear to have weathered the global financial crisis better than firms led by men, possibly due to lower levels of risk taking and more prudent management strategies. Palvia et al. (2015) show that among U.S. commercial banks, smaller banks with female CEOs and/or board chairs were less likely to fail during the global financial crisis, which may be explained by the fact that these banks were holding higher levels of equity capital. Cowling et al. (2020) show that among medium sized enterprises in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, women-led businesses were less likely to apply for loans but more often successful in their loan applications, a pattern which may suggest greater risk aversion among women entrepreneurs.

On the COVID-19 pandemic and more directly aligned with the focus of our paper, several recent studies and reports in the popular media suggest that the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on female entrepreneurs. Evidence from cross-country data sets has been documented by ANDE (2020b) and Facebook et al. (2020). Additional evidence from country-level studies has been documented for Bangladesh (Jaim, 2021); India (ANDE, 2020a; Chawla et al., 2020); the United Kingdom (Reuschke et al., 2021); and the United States (Fairlie, 2020; Manolova et al., 2020; Bloom et al., 2021), among other settings. Many of these studies, however, especially those referring to developing countries, are either based on relatively small samples (typically covering a few hundred firms or even fewer), or use a sampling approach that is not well suited to draw inferences on a target population (Schneider, 2020). Therefore, caution must be exercised in generalizing the results from these case studies. Liu et al. (2021) offer more robust evidence drawing on World Bank Enterprise Surveys data for 24 countries to explore gender gaps in business performance. They find that women-led businesses were more likely to be closed, and closed for longer periods of time, than men-led businesses and that women entrepreneurs expressed more pessimistic views about the future. While related, our paper expands this analysis in several directions. First, by leveraging two different data sources, i.e. World 5