通过儿童保育改革释放女性创业精神（英）

Daniela M. Behr* & Felicia Siegrist+his Brief explores how childcare responsibilities shape women’s entrepreneurial choices and businessgrowth, drawing on data from theWomen, Business and the Lawproject as well as complementaryevidence from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Nigeria. Globally, women spend nearly three times as muchtime providing unpaid care compared to men, constraining their ability to start and grow firms. WhileT laws enabling women’s economic participation are expanding globally, limited supportive childcare policies limitwomen’s choices and entrepreneurial potential. Even where laws exist, gaps in their implementation orenforcement as well as prevailing social norms may shape how families divide care, how markets respond, andhow policymakers prioritize childcare. This Brief highlights the importance of incorporating care systematicallyinto entrepreneurship policy. It calls for expanding affordable and quality childcare, addressing social norms, andsupporting women-led care enterprises through accelerators, market access platforms, and tailored financialproducts. It highlights initiatives like theWomen Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi)as models forcoordinated investment in the care economy to unlock women’s entrepreneurial potential.Public Disclosure Authorized TheHidden Costs of Care for WomenEntrepreneursand the Opportunities for constrains not only individual opportunity but also broadereconomic output. Increasing female labor force participationcouldboost GDP up to 20 percent,with particularlysubstantial gains in developing countries where gender gaps Globally, women entrepreneurs drive innovation, createjobs, and deliver solutions to pressing social and economicchallenges (Bullough et al. 2022; Duflo 2012). Yet behindmanyof their success stories lies an often-overlookedobstacle:the unequal burden of unpaid care work,specificallychildcare.Childcare is one of the mosttime-consumingforms of unpaid care work.Globally,women spend nearly three times as much time on unpaidcare as men, limiting the time, flexibility, and resources theyPublic Disclosure Authorized Whilewomen entrepreneurs are not a homogenousgroup,rangingfromnecessity-drivenlivelihoodentrepreneurs to high-growth startup founders (GEM 2023;We-Fi et al. 2025), care responsibilities can shape women’sentrepreneurial choices and business growth. First, unpaidcare acts as a labor supply barrier.Women may turn toself-employmentwhen traditional employment becomesincompatible with care demands. During the COVID-19pandemic, childcare closures pushed many women into“necessity entrepreneurship”, entrepreneurship born out ofdifficult economic circumstances, as wage work was nolongerfeasible(Conroy and Rupasingha 2025;Tribin Agrowing body of evidence reveals that careresponsibilitiesdirectly shape women’s labor forceparticipation, and by extension, their ability to start andsustain businesses (Goldin 2014; Halim et al. 2023; Hotz etal. 2018; Niesten 2025). An estimated 708 million women Figure 1 Beyond Legal Reform: Why Implementation ofChildcareLaws and Policies Matters forWomen Entrepreneurs Rosenbluth2010).The impact is significant:in somecontexts,women-led businesses with care obligationsexperience up to 48 percent lower profitability due to “timepoverty” compared with those without such responsibilities(Delecourt and Fitzpatrick 2021). Third, care responsibilitiesaffectwomen entrepreneurs indirectly through theirworkforce, as women-led firms are more likely to employwomen(Chiplunkar and Goldberg 2024),whose owncaregivingconstraints can affect performance and The World Bank’sWomen, Business and the Lawprojectmeasures laws—or the absence thereof—that affect women’seconomic opportunity across different life stages: Safety,Mobility, Work, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare,Entrepreneurship,Assets,and Pension,covering 190economies. TheEntrepreneurshiptopic assesses women’s legalcapacity in entrepreneurial activities such as starting andrunning a business, signing a contract, and opening a bankaccount, as well as their ability to become business leaders and win public contracts. TheChildcaretopic focuses on laws This Brief explores the interconnections between childcareand women’s entrepreneurship, a policy-relevant area whereempiricalevidence and policy analysis remain limited.Drawing on quantitative data from Women, Business andthe Law (WBL), WBL-Gallup pilot data on women’s livedexperiences, as well as on qualitative interviews conductedwith women entrepreneurs, the Brief examines how legalframeworks and social norms related to childcare shape While childcare laws have been shown to increase laborforce participation by up to 2.2 percent (Anukriti et al.2025), legal reform alone is not enough. Legal equality mustbe accompanied by policies and systems that enable womento exercise their rights in practice. On childcare specifically,there is a substantial implementation gap across all regions codifying childcare-related laws, th