Women in innovative start-ups and regional inclusiveness: ‘green’ and socially-responsible companies

We explore the link between women in business decision-making roles, regional gender equality in the workforce and start-up sustainability. We employ unique administrative data on innovative start-ups in Italy and implement a novel crawler-based semantic search of start-ups’ websites to identify ‘green’ firms. Our findings on high-tech innovative start-ups confirm established evidence in the female entrepreneurship literature: greater shares of women in decision-making roles increase the probability of a social focus but decrease the likelihood of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-intensive green energy objectives. Instead, the board gender composition does not correlate with non-energy ‘green’ objectives. Non-energy ‘green’ firms emerge more in gender-equal regions, while social start-ups develop where women have fewer employment opportunities.