Gender-based Small Business Programming: The Case of the Women’s Enterprise Initiative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The incidence of, and controversy surrounding, gender-based small business training programs are both increasing. However, the nature and impact of these initiatives are not well documented. This empirical paper summarizes the findings of an evaluation of the impact of the Women’s Enterprise Initiative (WEI), a programthat seeks to foster the development of women-owned firms in Western Canada. Program assessment criteria included program effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses, job creation and retention, business survival, incrementality, and the facilitation of enterprise growth. The results suggest that men and women seek differenttypes of assistance with respect to business development. When compared to a control group of business owners, WEI clients and women business owners were more likely than males to prioritize intrinsic outcomes such as evaluation of entrepreneurial skills, building self-confidence, and improving strategic management skills. Conversely, male business owners prioritized operational skills such as helping to improve strategic management and identifying opportunities for growth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".