Bank Enterprise Surveys and Business Pulse Surveys, we are able to investigate gender gaps in enterprise performance over the course of the pandemic for a larger and more diverse set of 49 countries. Second, we not only consider a broader set of indicators of business performance (i.e. in addition to closures and future expectations, we also investigate changes in sales revenues and financial risks), but also analyze differences in how women- and men-led businesses responded to the pandemic shock (e.g. in terms of labor adjustments, technology adoptions, and/or product innovations) and in their access to public support programs. Third, our analysis is careful to distinguish between conditional and unconditional gender gaps and also examines the heterogeneity of gender gaps across specific groups of businesses (e.g. in enterprises in a specific sector or of a certain size).

# **3. Description of the survey and characteristics of the sample**

This paper draws on the harmonized firm-level data in Apedo-Amah et al. (2020), which combines the first wave of the World Bank Business Pulse Surveys (BPS) and the COVID-19 follow-up of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES). This novel data set tracks the potential impact of the pandemic on the private sector with regards to critical dimensions of business performance, such as operations of the business, sales revenue, liquidity and insolvency, labor adjustments, adoption of technology, expectations and uncertainty about the future, and access to public support.

The BPS and WBES subsamples contain different pieces of information that we leverage to classify businesses as male or female-led. The WBES data explicitly capture whether the firm’s top manager is female and whether there are any women among the firm’s owners. We define a firm as woman-led if at least one of these conditions is met - i.e. the business is managed by a woman and/or has a female owner.<sup>4</sup> The BPS have been implemented in collaboration with private sector associations, statistical agencies, and other government agencies (mainly Ministries of Finance and Economy), with implementation guidelines offered by the World Bank. The questionnaire did not ask about the sex of the owner or top manager, but the guidelines strongly suggest interviewing preferably the owner or top manager of the business, and we use the information on the respondent’s sex and position within the firm (e.g. owner, top manager or other) to proxy for whether the business is led by a man or a woman.<sup>5</sup> Notice that in cases where the survey respondent is neither the owner nor the manager, the gender indicator will be missing. To avoid any bias resulting from missing values for our main variable of interest, we drop country-level data sets where the gender and position of the respondent are not generally available or where typically someone other than the firm’s owner or manager provided answers to the questionnaire. More precisely, we drop country-level data sets where the fraction of missing values for the gender indicator is 30% or more, which excludes eight countries from the data set harmonized by Apedo-Amah et al. (2020)–Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, India, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali and the Philippines. We also drop countries where one or more regressors are not available (Afghanistan, Armenia, and the Comoros). In the remaining 49 countries, the share of observations without information on whether the firm is led by a woman or man is relatively small (around 9% on average; see Table B1). Moreover, when we drop observations that contain no information on whether the firm is led by a woman or man, the distribution of observations in our final sample across geographical regions, size categories, sectors,

> 4Having a female owner does not rule out additional male owners.

> 5Unfortunately, we cannot distinguish in our BPS data between women as top managers and women as owners - though other studies suggest that gender gaps may be somewhat more pronounced if the comparison is based on management (e.g. Aterido and Hallward-Driemeier, 2011; Islam et al., 2020; Martínez-Zarzoso, 2017).

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