The Measurement of Business Ownership by Gender in the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database

Understanding women’s business ownership and the performance of women-owned enterprises is important for designing policies to promote gender equality in leadership, economic empowerment of women and inclusive growth. However, evidence on business ownership by gender remains scarce because of the lack of comprehensive data. The study, Women-owned Enterprises in Canada (Grekou, Li and Liu, 2018), fills the data gap by identifying business ownership by gender using a newly developed administrative dataset–the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database (CEEDD). The dataset contains business owner information for all unincorporated enterprises and private corporations in Canada. This paper discusses the methodology adopted to establish the gender structure of business ownership. It then presents estimates of business ownership by gender (men or women majority ownership and equal ownership). Finally, it analyzes the sensitivity of these estimates and compares them with those calculated using other data sources.

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