Clarify the relationship between gender and bank credit rationing

Determine whether and how entrepreneur gender is related to bank credit rationing in bank lending to entrepreneurs, and delineate the nature of this relationship where it exists, to resolve the lack of a clearly defined link reported in prior research on women’s entrepreneurial finance.

Background

The paper reviews prior work on women entrepreneurs’ access to finance and notes inconsistent and contradictory findings regarding gender effects in bank lending. Some studies report fewer applications or approvals for women, others find no gender effect, and still others document more adverse credit conditions for women-led firms. This inconsistency has left the connection between gender and bank credit rationing insufficiently specified.

Motivated by this ambiguity, the authors develop and test hypotheses using French survey data to compare access to bank loans versus equity fundraising among women founders, highlighting the need to precisely characterize if and how gender shapes bank credit rationing in entrepreneurial finance.