Working with women, do men get all the credit?

Abstract

Are firms that are managed and owned by females-only appraised differently than those where genders mix at the top? To answer this question, we study 7,467 small and medium-sized firms from 22 countries. We find that – when borrowing from banks – firms that are both managed and owned by females more often report binding credit constraints and higher interest rate payments than male-only firms; differences that we can attribute to taste-based discrimination. In contrast, if the manager and the owner have a different gender, we find no such differences with male-only firms. Hence, interestingly banks seem to assume that women invariably play second fiddle in the mixed-gender firms. We also show that discrimination between female-only and other firms disappears from economically more developed regions and from credit markets that are more competitive or dominated by transactional lenders.