Women Entrepreneurs Focus On Local Markets - Except in Asia

The newly released Women's Entrepreneurship Report by research consortium Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows that men are still slightly ahead globally when it comes to founding and establishing their own business, while women have been catching up majorly. The report also shows that women are more likely to focus their businesses on local markets. There is one exception, however. In Central and East Asia, internationally focused startups are in equal parts led my men and women, while those concentrating on local markets are led by men 57 percent of the time.

This is in contrast to other world regions, where women have reached some parity when tackling local markets but lag behind more in terms of internationally focused startups. In the Middle East and Africa as well as in North America, international market startups were led by men 64 percent and 66 percent of the time, respectively, in 2023. The same number was 60 percent in Europe as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.

In developing regions, early-stage entrepreneurial activity focuses much less on international markets. While in Latin America, local markets reign supreme, catapulting women into the spotlight among entrepreneurs, Central and East Asia as well as the Middle East and Africa focus on national markets first and local markets second, giving women a window to excel in the less crowded international space. Chinese women lead this push with 73 percent of entrepreneurs focused internationally being female. The same phenomenon is observable in Iran, where 61 percent of women entrepreneurs dominate the international market.

Chinese women have been reported to set up more online businesses than Chinese men. With China's role in the international consumer goods market that has been moving towards direct exports recently, women have claimed their spot in international startups, for example from the sectors of clothing or cosmetics. While most startups remain small, some of the world's richest self-made women have earned fortunes in China producing and exporting more expensive cosmetics products like facial fillers, collagen or hyaluronic acid to the world.

Differences persist between female and male founders in terms of company size, where men more often stated they would hire more people, as well as the type of company founded. Here, women were overrepresented in the fields of wholesale retail, government and social services. Women were also still 50 percent more likely than men to quit their startup for family or personal reasons.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports that since 2001-2005, the share of women participating in entrepreneurial activity - that means founding and establishing their own business for the first 3.5 years - has risen in 30 continuously studied countries from an average of 6.1 percent to 10.4 percent by 2021-2023. For comparison, while in 2023, 10.9 percent of women in 45 countries and territories were entrepreneurs, this number was 13.8 percent for men.