Entrepreneurship performance and gender differences in west Africa: examining the nexus at country level

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurial activities and gender differences in West Africa, using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) panel estimation across countries. Taking a cue from the Liberal feminist theory, this paper supports that the entrepreneurial disposal of women influences their contributions regarding their entrepreneurial performance. The purpose is to bring the experience, knowledge, and interests of women and men to bear in national entrepreneurship context. We rely on the indicators of global entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) to adopt a region specific measure of entrepreneurship as our dependent variable. We use a country-specific approach to give a better understanding of how entrepreneurship in the same region but with different policy orientations operates. Our findings reveal that women contributed lesser that men to entrepreneurship. However, there were both similarities and differences of gender entrepreneurship performance across countries in the Anglophone and Francophone countries. It was therefore recommended that mainstreaming gender should be an important function of policy makers especially at government levels in order to avoid marginalization of women in entrepreneurship pursuits.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Gender, Women, Men, Performance