Female national-level entrepreneurship and the gendered dimension of the cultural environment

There has been a continuous increase in the number of women-headed businesses during the last decades and, consequently, the interest on its rates and profiles has grown both in academic and policy research. Most recent literature on the subject has found that not only socio-demographic characteristics and perceptual variables affect entrepreneurial decisions, but also contextual factors are clue to disentangle gender differences in entrepreneurial activities. The central aim of this paper is to examine how institutional factors and gender attitudes are related to female entrepreneurship. Panel analyses investigate the determinants of female early stage entrepreneurship rates from 2001 to 2015 at the country-level using aggregated data from six sources of 34 countries covering different geographical regions worldwide. Results have shown that government integrity, cultural support to businesswomen and female participation in tertiary education positively influence the share of female entrepreneurs