In Ukraine, the trend of women opening individual entrepreneurs more often than men continues. Last year, women overtook men, although men are still leading the way in opening new companies, UNN reports with reference to the YouControl.Market team.
Over the past five years, there has been a trend of women opening more sole proprietorships than men. In 2022, due to the full-scale war in the country, the number of new sole proprietorships decreased significantly, but women remained more active in this area. In the following year, 2023, the number of new sole proprietorships opened by women increased rapidly and exceeded the number opened by men by 45 thousand. This is 57% of the total number of new sole proprietorships in 2023.
"The increase in the share of businesswomen due to organic growth, rather than a decrease in the share of men, indicates that they have begun to actively use the opportunities of small business," said Mykhailo Koltsov, YouControl Compliance Expert and external consultant to the World Bank in the field of data analysis and cybersecurity.
However, when it comes to creating new companies, men still hold the lead: in 2023, women created only 24% of new businesses. This trend has been going on in Ukraine for decades. Only in 2022 was there a slight increase in the number of new companies founded by women - 29% of the total.
Overall, there are almost 1 million active commercial companies in Ukraine. Women own more than 18% of these firms, while another 14% are jointly owned by women and men. More than 54% of legal entities with commercial organizational and legal forms are owned by men.
"Most new sole proprietorships in the second year of the full-scale war were created by women to provide beauty services - more than 18,000. This area has become the most popular among all newly created sole proprietorships in the second year of the great war, and the share of women sole proprietors in it is 94%," the study says.
Recall
The open data platform Opendatabot has investigatedhow the full-scale war has affected the gender distribution among entrepreneurs. Thus, 51% of sole proprietorships opened since the beginning of the year are run by women