Title: Female representation and talent allocation in entrepreneurship: the role of early exposure to entrepreneurs

Abstract: Women are highly under-represented in entrepreneurship in all OECD countries, raising concerns both from a gender equality and an aggregate productivity perspective. Using registry data from Denmark, we follow one million individuals from adolescence into adulthood to study whether higher exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence can improve female representation and talent allocation in entrepreneurship. We exploit within-school, across-cohort variation in adolescents' exposure to entrepreneurship, as measured by the share of their peers whose parents are entrepreneurs during the last years of compulsory schooling. We find that higher exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence encourages girls' entry and tenure into this profession. The effect is driven by exposure to the parents of female peers and works via a decrease in girls' likelihood to discontinue education at the end of compulsory schooling and to hold low-paying jobs as adults. The increase in female entrepreneurship is associated with the creation of firms that are larger and survive for longer than the average firm, indicating that early exposure improves the allocation of talent in entrepreneurship by reducing women's entry barriers to this profession. Our results suggest that such barriers are both cultural and informational in nature and that raising women's early exposure to entrepreneurship from the 25th to the 75th percentile would increase the total number of jobs created by entrepreneurs by 5.3%.