Testing the Differential Impact of COVID-19 on Self-Employed Women and Men in the United Kingdom

Abstract

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Impact of COVID-19 on women owned firms

“…The COVID-19 crisis confirms the significant impact of crowd wisdom, social consciousness, and collective knowledge formation. Darja Reuschke, et al (2021) found that COVID-19 impact self-employment exits were not gender-specific. But women are more likely to lose income due to depletion of working hours.…”

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women-Led Businesses

“…Evidence from cross-country data sets has been documented by ANDE (2020b) and Facebook et al (2020). Additional evidence from country-level studies has been documented for Bangladesh (Jaim, 2021); India (ANDE, 2020a;Chawla et al, 2020); the United Kingdom (Reuschke et al, 2021); and the United States (Fairlie, 2020;Manolova et al, 2020;Bloom et al, 2021), among other settings. Many of these studies, however, especially those referring to developing countries, are either based on relatively small samples (typically covering a few hundred firms or even fewer), or use a sampling approach that is not well suited to draw inferences on a target population (Schneider, 2020).…”

Female entrepreneurs managing from home

“…Women are more likely to be pushed rather than pulled into self-employment, or small business ownership, meaning that some women may go into entrepreneurship by necessity and not because it is the most attractive career opportunity (Pines et al, 2010). During the COVID-19 crisis, women entrepreneurs were more likely to be at risk of reduced hours and earnings than men due to increased childcare responsibilities during lockdowns and school closures (Reuschke et al, 2021). Also, despite of being hit harder in some domains, women-led businesses were less likely to receive public support (Torres et al, 2021).…”

“…8 Women-led businesses were more severely affected by the COVID-19 crisis than men-led businesses due to the increased need for childcare in the home associated with lockdowns and school closures (Reuschke et al, 2021;Torres et al, 2021).…”