Gender bond, innovative financial tools in woman enterprises

This paper aims to analyse how an innovative financial tool for female-led Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) can contribute to the development and sustainability of these businesses. Women's enterprises can only reach high levels of indebtedness if there are equally high personal guarantees. Women's enterprises have always been distinguished from men's enterprises by simpler financial management, mainly related to the control of internal sources of finance, such as treasury and equity of the female entrepreneur, and only residually of external sources by way of debt capital. The development of sustainable finance in recent years has opened up the use of capital to the explicit aim of reducing the gender gap. In this context, Gender Bonds (GB) seem to be the most viable solution to solve this issue and, at the same time, meet today's sustainable development challenge. In this way, the present paper aims to answer the following RQ. RQ1: what is a Gender Bond and what are its characteristics in term of sustainability? RQ2: what economic and financial benefits can a GB bring to women's enterprises? The present work is supported by an exploratory descriptive qualitative (EDQ) research. As above, EDQ conducted by document analysis represents the first step in developing grounded theory (GT). This paper aims to expand the literature on the topic of sustainable financial tools for woman enterprises, with a special focus on the gender bond. This study therefore highlights how all those new financial tools, such as gender bond, succeed in improving the economic results of woman companies. It also highlights how the use of gender bond can allow to woman enterprises to improve their financial structure.