The NSSO surveys the ownership type of each establishment. Establishments can be listed as male proprietary, female proprietary, other owned, cooperative, household partnership, multi-household partnership, private LLC, and unknown. We focus primarily on the establishments listed as either male proprietary or female proprietary. These two groups constitute 98% of establishments in the informal manufacturing sector in 2000 and 2005 and 98% and 91% of establishments in services in 2001 and 2006, respectively.We use incumbent establishments defined as female proprietary to determine female business-ownership shares by district-industry. When developing local indices of broader local business conditions, described in the next section, we use all incumbent establishments.

Our analysis primarily considers female entrepreneurship. Our female entrepreneurs are a subset of the female business owners. We identify entrepreneurs using establishments that are classified as being less than three years old. Ghani et al. (2011a, c) describe this choice of how to measure entrepreneurship and our entry metrics in further detail. This young establishment distinction is unfortunately not collected for services establishments in 2006. As a consequence, we are limited to a cross-sectional analysis of female entrepreneurship rates for services in 2001, while we have much greater longitudinal flexibility in manufacturing. In addition, we define incumbent establishments to be those older than three years. We use this incumbent group, which is mutually exclusive from the entrants, in defining all of our incumbent industrial structures. In 2000, 14% of manufacturing establishments in our sample are young entrants, and the comparable figure from 2001 for services is 20%.

Table 1 provides broad descriptive statistics on our sample. Tables 2a and 2b list by state the gender traits of business owners<sup>3</sup> in manufacturing and services establishments, respectively, in the 20 states of our sample. Figure 1 provides a visual presentation. These 20 states are a subset of the initial 35 states/union territories available. The 15 exclusions were due to three potential factors: 1) the state was not sampled across all of our surveys, 2) the small sample size for the state raised data quality concerns, or 3) persistent conflict and political turmoil existed in the region. Our explicit criteria with respect to size are that the district has a population of at least one million in the 2001 census and has 50 or more establishments sampled. The exclusions are minor in terms of economic activity, and the resulting panel accounts for over 90% of employment in both sectors throughout the period of study.

In Table 2a, relative female business-ownership rates in unorganized manufacturing are particularly high in Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nandu. These states have an average female establishment ownership rate exceeding 45%. In contrast, low female ownership shares are evident in Delhi, Bihar, Haryana, and Gujarat. The average female business-ownership share

> 3Comparable entrepreneurship tables are available upon request. We document female business owner ratios in Tables 2a-3b so that the longitudinal pattern in services can be discussed.

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