Stability in search of explanations: Quantifying Italian businesswomen in the twentieth century

This paper presents the first quantification of the presence of businesswomen in the Italian economy over the whole twentieth century. It does so by reconstructing new indicators from two different sources: population censuses and Chamber of Commerce rolls. While well-known to historians, neither had been adopted for this purpose before. By means of these sources, we estimate the number and share of women independent workers at census years from 1901 to 2001, with regional and sectoral decomposition for 1901, 1951, and 2001, and yearly figures on female start-ups between 1925 and 1978 in Bergamo, a medium-sized town in Northern Italy. Against prevailing narratives, both indicators point to a relatively stable share of women, between 20 and 30%, throughout the whole twentieth century. This result, obtained by means of two independent sources and different indicators, challenges most explanations of female entrepreneurship and calls for further research on this neglected topic.