Dhriti Swarup ’23 and Professor Gisella Kagy

This summer I worked with Professor Kagy to better understand gender profit gaps with a focus on low income countries by synthesizing existing research in entrepreneurship and enterprise performance. We wanted to understand the factors affecting differences in firm outcomes (profits, sales etc.) by gender of the firm owner. The goal of this 3 year long project is to explore the gender profitability gap in all countries, improve understanding of the global business and policy environment for women-owned enterprises, and increase knowledge of facts, trends, and predictors of gender profit gap at the country and global level.

I was working with a team of Research Assistants and Postdocs to conduct country level analysis in Stata using publicly available datasets such as the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES), the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). I began by looking at the WBES for India across 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2014. The process involved finding the datasets and questionnaires used by the World Bank, keeping and dropping variables as per requirement in the cleaned datasets, and finally creating new variables to prepare the dataset, making it ready for analysis. The same was done for Vietnam across 2009 and 2015. The prepared datasets gave information about characteristics such as firm size, industry sector, legal status, firm ownership, and obstacles faced by the firms.

Vietnam WBES Questionnaire 2009

Professor Kagy and Professor Hardy (from NYU) will use this data along with that of other countries to draw conclusions and present a hypothesis. The end goal is to direct new enquiries productively towards key potential barriers for Women Owned Enterprises and find ways to close the information gap along with the gender profit gaps.