Persistent yet ameliorable shocks to female entrepreneurship: Experimental evidence from Kenya

While female entrepreneurs face multiple obstacles, it is unclear whether gender gaps worsen during economic crises: women, especially married women, may be more affected than men due to these obstacles, but could also be less exposed due to their specialized sectors, or if a crisis flattens everyone together. Leveraging on a unique timing of collecting baseline data just before COVID-19, we examine the impact of randomized grants and business training of partnered female and male microentrepreneurs two years after the crisis. We find that women were more severely impacted by the pandemic, but that the grants significantly helped mitigate the crisis impacts on business ownership, sales, profits, income, and well-being. In terms of channels of impact, the grants increased women's labor supply, at the expense of domestic work, leisure time, and childcare hours, while, for men, time is reallocated from wage employment to their business. • COVID-19 widened gender gaps in business and income for Kenyan youth. • Vignettes revealed women's lost bargaining power during crisis. • Randomized business grants boosted both women's & men's firms during COVID. • Grants moved women into labor force, men to self-employment from wage work.