The reason for using multiple, complementary datasets is that it allows me to investigate whether the differences across female and male-owned firms vary across countries and firm types. Moreover, as will become clear in the discussion below, each dataset has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of sample size, coverage, and questions that could be relevant to identifying obstacles for female entrepreneurs.

Each of the datasets covers a different set of industries. The Enterprise Surveys cover only manufacturing firms. The Mexican data covers all industries, but the Bolivian and Peruvian data only cover activities that are commonly performed by micro or small firms in each respective country. Appendix Table A1 contains a list of industries represented in each dataset, with the corresponding share of female-owned firms. In line with the statistics in Section 2, in the nationally representative Mexican data, the largest share of female firms is in the trade sector (45.3 percent), followed by manufacturing and services. The Enterprise Survey data, which is representative of large, formal firms in the manufacturing industry, indicates that there is quite a lot of variation in female-ownership within the manufacturing industry. The highest concentration of female-owned firms (32.2 percent) is in clothing manufacture, while there are few female-owned firms in textile manufacture (5.4 percent).

Table 1 compares averages and standard deviations for the variables used in this section across the different datasets. With 1.37 employees on average, firms in the Mexican data are smaller than the firms in the other datasets. Second largest are the firms in the Bolivian data, with 3.89 employees on average, followed by the firms in the Peruvian data, with 6.97 employees on average. With 85 employees on average, firms in the Enterprise Surveys stand out as being much larger than the firms in the other datasets. When looking at sales or profits as a measure of firm size, the Mexican data again includes the smallest firms, followed by the Bolivian data, the Peruvian data, and then the Enterprise Surveys.

About 30 percent of firms are female-owned in the Mexican and Peruvian data. In the Bolivian data, this number is higher (46 percent); while in the Enterprise Surveys, the number is much lower (15 percent). Appendix Figure A1 shows that, in the Mexican, Bolivian, and Peruvian datasets, the distribution of female-owned firms across firm size as measured by the number of employees is very similar to the one displayed in Figure 1 in Section 2. The percentage of female-owned firms reaches up to 55 percent in the smallest size category, but tends to decline with firm size. Note, however, that the datasets for Bolivia and Peru are not representative and that Table A1 can thus only be used to describe the sample, but not to draw conclusions about the percentage of female firms in these countries overall. Appendix Figure A1 also indicates that, among the relatively large manufacturing firms in the Enterprise Surveys, the percentage of female-owned firms again drops with firm size. Firms in the largest size category (over 100 employees) have very low shares of female ownership, varying from 4 percent in Ecuador and to 14 percent in El Salvador.

family firms from other firms in the data. The percentage of female owned firms as measured in the 2006 Enterprise Surveys is about twice as big as measured in the 2003 Enterprise Surveys, suggesting that any gender based statistics and differences generated from 2006 surveys might be confounded with characteristics of family owned firms. Sabarwal and Terrell (2009) use the 2006 Enterprise Surveys to examine differences in firm characteristics and firm performance across firms with partial female ownership and firms without any female ownership.

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