Entrepreneurship in Switzerland: Business activity by women

The percentage of women entrepreneurs remains lower than that of their male counterparts in Switzerland.

In 2021, only 7.2 per cent of women were ready to engage in early entrepreneurial activities (which do not necessarily translate into a company), compared to the 12.3 per cent of men according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Switzerland 2020/2021 National Report. The ratio of female entrepreneurs compared to their male counterparts declined from 0.9 to 0.6 between 2020 and 2021.

In 2020, just less than half of business start-ups in Switzerland (45.9%) involved one or more women according to the estimates of the Federal Statistics Office (FSO).

Number of new enterprises established in 2020
Total	40,188
By women and men	3,926	9.8%
By men	21,762	54.1%
By women	14,500	36.1%

Source: FSO, Statistics on business demography 2020

Female entrepreneurship in Switzerland

Women are still under-represented in the category of sole proprietors or employees of their own company, but they are gaining ground. This percentage of women in the population of entrepreneurs stood at 36.7% in Q4 2020, whereas it only reached 28.2% in 1991, according to the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) by the FSO. The percentage of female entrepreneurs in the resident female population stood at 5.8% in Q4 2020, versus 10.3% for their male counterparts.