Despite high rates of women’s entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia, women-led enterprises lag behind their male-run counterparts in size, profitability, resilience, and growth potential. Participatory workshops with girls and young women in Indonesia, Lao PDR and Thailand were combined with a quantitative survey and interviews with subject matter experts, as well as some workshops with young men, to examine how girls’ and young women’s expectations and values are shaped in adolescence and how this affects their capacity and agency for entrepreneurship and leadership.

The study found that, due to gendered social norms, young women in Asia and the Pacific spend triple the time on unpaid care and domestic work than young men. Girls and young women have lower self-confidence than boys and young men, have a high fear of failure, and feel that their individual needs and choices are secondary to their family duties. An absence of female role models reinforces their perceptions.

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