Employees Gender Composition and Firm Growth: Evidence from Manufacturing Industry in Cooperative Sector during the Second Development Plan in Irn (1995- 99)

The performance of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), measured by employment growth, and hence their ability for job creation as a remedy for unemployment has been an important area of economic debate since the last three decades. However recent studies, mostly in developing countries, have found evidence that gender has significant effect on SME performance. Utilizing profit regression technique, this paper examines the effect of employee's gender composition in cooperative sector on SME growth using data obtained from General Census of Manufacturing and Mines in Iran (GCMM). This includes 12,000 manufacturing SMEs, with 1 to 99 employees. The results suggest that employee's gender composition incooperative sector has no significant effect on SME growth. Using Heckman’s two-step procedure, we find that sample selection bias is not a problem in the study of manufacturing SME growth in co-operative sector during the years of the Second Development Plan in Iran.