Only the Dominican Republic publishes open data about women owned businesses, whichs allows to analyse the participation of women suppliers in the procurement market. Both Chile and the city of Buenos Aires have implemented a registry of women suppliers, but this data is not currently disclosed in their open contracting datasets. Having open dissagregated data about women participation in procurement helps idenitify the gaps and areas of improvement to achieve more inclusion of women in public contracting.
Only 29% of the suppliers are women owned in the Dominican Republic, while in Buenos Aires 23% of the self-employed suppliers are female (this does not consider firm suppliers).
Women receive fewer contracts, a lower value and they tend to participate more in services related tenders than in work procurement. For instance in the Dominican republic, from 2018 to March 2020, approximately $3,580 million were awarded in public contracts, but women only recieved 17% of the total value ($612 million). In Buenos Aires, out of the $18 million awarded to individual suppliers in 2018 and 2019, only 9.5% was awarded to women.
In the Dominican Republic, 58% of the women owned businesses are micro enterprises, while only 2.6% are large firms.
The Dominican Republic, as part of their OCDS publication include a data field to identify the gender of the supplier. For natural persons the field represents their gender and for enterprises it represents the gender of the person with more than 50% of the shares or of its manager. This allows to identify the participation of women in the public procurement market.
The following analysis is based on 122.313 active or terminated contracts signed between 2018 and March 2020.
What proportion of contracts do women receive?
During this period, 11.035 suppliers were awarded contracts, out of those only 29% of them were female or female owned businesses. Out of the total number of contracts, 28% went to women, but they only received 17% of the total value awarded ($612 million out of $3580) . This shows there is a big gender gap in procurement, with women being awarded less contracts and a lower value.
| gender | proportion |
|---|---|
| female | 28.7 |
| male | 71.3 |
Are women led-businesses smaller?
Most of the suppliers are firms, instead of individuals selling to the government. However, out of all the female suppliers 70% are female owned businesses and 30% are individuals, compared to 76% of male firms. Half of the suppliers have information about their scale, to identify if they are large, medium, small or micro enterprises. Out of these suppliers, as shown in the plot below, there is a higher proportion of micro businesses owned by a women (58.5% versus 49%) and women have a lower participation in large enterprises (2.6% versus 5.5%).
| female | male | |
|---|---|---|
| firm | 70.5 | 75.9 |
| person | 29.5 | 24.1 |
Comparing 2018 to 2019, while the proportion of contracts awarded to women remained similar (around 28%), the value decreased from 20% to 16.8%. Up to March 2020, only 11% of the total value awarded has gone to women.
Also, data shows that proportionately, women participate more in services related contracts and have a lower participation on works.
Are they represented in the top suppliers?
Women suppliers won between one and 1375 contracts. 78% was awarded less than 10 contracts, 20% less than a 100 and only 2% received more than 100 contracts in the time period analysed. Also a single female supplier concentrated 8% of the total value awarded, distributed in 9 contracts. This shows, most of female suppliers have a low participation rate in the market and there is not a high concentration in the value awarded.
When analysing the top 10 suppliers based on the total value awarded, only 2 are women owned businesses.
| Number of contracts | proportion |
|---|---|
| less than 10 | 78 |
| less than 100 | 20 |
| more than 100 | 2 |
The city of Buenos Aires, implemented recently Sello Mujer, a mechanism for voluntary identification of women-led suppliers registered in the city’s registry of suppliers. However, this information is not currently disclossed as open data, and their OCDS publication does not include a data field to identify if the supplier is a women owned business. Between 2018 and 2019 19% of the suppliers in Buenos Aires were individuals (that concentrated 4% of the total value awarded) and 81% were firms. For suppliers who are individuals and not firms, we identified the gender of the supplier using the name as a proxy, with a machine learning classifier that predicts the gender based on the name with 96% accuracy.
We then analysed the participation of women, who are self-employed and sold to the goverment, between 2018 and 2019.
| type | suppliers | total_value | proportion_suppliers | proportion_value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| firm | 1640 | 30229229996 | 80.7 | 96.1 |
| person | 391 | 1212985693 | 19.3 | 3.9 |
How much do they sell to the government? Out of all the suppliers who are individuals, 23% are self-employed women. However they received only 9.2% of the contracts and 9.6% of the total value awarded, which shows a big gender gap in procurement opportunities for female suppliers.
| gender | proportion |
|---|---|
| Female | 23.2 |
| Male | 76.8 |
While the participation of female suppliers is low, the proportion of contracts they recieved increased from 7% in 2018 to 14% in 2019.
What items do they provide? Porportionately there are more women suppliers in services related contracts (31%), while only 7.6% of the suppliers are women in construccion contracts.
On average women suppliers received 3.5 contracts during the analysed period, while men won on average 10 contracts. None of the top 10 individual suppliers with the highest value awarded is female. The women with the highest value awarded ranks as number 14.
| gender | mean | median |
|---|---|---|
| Female | 3.5 | 1 |
| Male | 10.3 | 2 |