We develop an institutional perspective to examine the important, albeit largely overlooked, occurrence of borrowing discouragement for female-owned enterprises: the likelihood that they will not seek business financing because they believe their requests will be rejected. Given a prevailing business logic casting the field of entrepreneurship as largely male-typed, we theorize that female-owned enterprises will be more likely than their male-owned counterparts to exhibit borrowing discouragement. However, we also further propose that gender-based borrowing discouragement will be influenced by female empowerment levels in three distinct indicators of female empowerment that vary by geographic region within a society: social and economic autonomy, reproductive rights, and political participation. We find strong support for our predictions using a unique multi-sourced sample of 4090 small businesses operating in the United States.

我们开发了一个制度视角来检查女性拥有的企业借款受阻的重要但在很大程度上被忽视的情况：他们不会寻求商业融资的可能性，因为他们认为他们的请求会被拒绝。鉴于普遍的商业逻辑将企业家精神领域塑造为主要是男性类型，我们的理论是女性拥有的企业比男性拥有的企业更有可能表现出借贷沮丧。然而，我们还进一步提出，基于性别的借贷阻碍将受到女性赋权水平的影响，这三个不同的女性赋权指标因社会中的地理区域而异：社会和经济自主权、生殖权利和政治参与。