Report · One-off

Women in the Latvian Register

35.6% of Latvian limited companies registered from 2015 to 2025 had at least one woman among their founders, and the share has barely moved in a decade: between 34.6% and 37.4% every year. Women are 33.6% of founders. Among the startups and scaleups on this map, 23.6% have a woman among their owners, against 35.4% across the register.

How Many Latvian Companies Have a Woman Founder?

35.6% of Latvian limited companies registered from 2015 to 2025 had at least one woman among their founders, and the share has barely moved in a decade: between 34.6% and 37.4% every year. Women are 33.6% of all founders.

Today’s owners, read from a different file and answering a different question, tell the same story: 33.1% to 36.0% of each year’s companies have a woman among their beneficial owners.

Unlike the experienced-founder share in who starts companies, this line survives the survivors test. The register lists founders and owners only for live companies, so each year describes the companies still alive. Across the 6 years from 2015 to 2020, the share still alive spans 25.7 points while the share with a woman founder spans only 2.8, a correlation of -0.015. Whether a company has a woman founder looks unrelated to whether it survives, so the flat line is a finding rather than an artefact.

How Many Latvian Companies Are Founded by One Person?

89.1% of companies registered since 2015 were founded by one person: 59.1% by a man and 30.0% by a woman. Teams are the exception. 5.3% were founded by men only, 4.3% by a mixed team and 1.3% by women only, so a mixed team is 39.4% of all teams.

Are Latvian Startups Less Likely to Have a Woman Owner?

Yes. Of the 530 startups and scaleups on this map whose owners could all be classified, 23.6% have a woman among their beneficial owners and 11.5% are owned entirely by women, against 35.4% and 29.0% across all active companies in the register.

The register figures cover all 133,112 classified active companies. Women are 34.2% of the register’s beneficial owners.

The map was assembled from ecosystem sources rather than sampled, so it is not a random slice of the register, and nothing here says why the gap exists. The founding-team lens cannot make this comparison: only 147 companies on the map still have a founding shareholder whose sex could be read, under the 200 a share needs.

Where in Latvia Do Women Found the Most Companies?

Among the 35 municipalities with at least 200 companies, the share with a woman founder is highest in Ventspils, at 41.1%, and lowest in Smiltenes nov., at 26.1%, with Rīga at 36.0%. The figures cover active companies registered from 2015 to 2025.

How Does Latvia Compare With the EU on Women Business Owners?

No EU-wide count of women founders is built from company registers, so the closest measure is Eurostat’s count of employers. In 2025, women were 30.4% of Latvia’s employers, against 27.7% across the EU, 24.1% in Estonia and 22.1% in Lithuania.

Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey counts employers as people whose main job is running their own business with employees. Eurostat flags the figure for Lithuania as low reliability. It is a survey of people rather than a count of companies, so it sits beside the register figures and is not compared with them.

How Is a Founder’s Sex Read From the Latvian Register?

From given names, because neither register file records sex. PMLP, which keeps the population register, publishes how many women and men hold every given name, and a name counts as a woman’s or a man’s when at least 95% of its holders are and at least 3 people hold it. That classifies 97.9% of founders.

The same rule classifies 97.0% of beneficial owners.

Latvian names give an independent check, because the language marks sex in the ending of a given name. Of the founders with a Latvian personal code classified as women, 99.7% have a feminine ending; of those classified as men, 92.6% have a masculine one; the rest carry given names that do not take the usual Latvian ending. The check is never used to classify anyone.

What Can Latvian Women Founder Data Not Tell You?

Whether companies founded by women survive differently, because the register lists founders only for live companies; gender, since the population register records sex and a name is only a proxy for that; why the shares are what they are; and anything about a person, since names are looked up and never stored.

• Whether companies founded by women survive differently. The register lists founders and owners only for live companies, so there is nothing to compare a closed company against. The survivors test above says the share does not move with survival across years, which is not the same as a survival rate by team.
• Gender. The population register records sex, and a name is a proxy even for that. People whose name is shared by women and men, or is too rare to classify, are left out, and a company is counted only when every founder or owner could be classified.
• Why. The register records who founded and owns a company, not why, and this page does not guess.
• Anything about a person. Names are read only to be looked up and are never stored. The page publishes counts and shares, and withholds any count under 20.

Method

• Founding team. Natural persons holding shares in an active SIA dated no more than 7 days after registration, and still holding them, as in who starts companies. Companies registered 2015 to 2025.
• Owners. Beneficial owners of every active SIA and AS, as in the foreign ownership report.
• Given names. The members file writes the surname first, so the forenames are the longest run of final words the population register knows as a given name. The full combination is tried before the first given name alone.
• Withheld figures. A count from 1 to 19 is shown as fewer than 20, and no share is published over fewer than 200 companies.

Definitions are frozen at version 4. The full set is on the methodology page.

Sources

• Uzņēmumu reģistrs, members of limited liability companies. Extract of 10 September 2026.
• Uzņēmumu reģistrs, beneficial owners. Extract of 7 September 2026.
• PMLP, Personu vārdi, given names in the Natural Persons Register by sex, as of 1 July 2026.
• Eurostat, self-employed persons by citizenship (lfsa_esgan).
• Uzņēmumu reģistrs open data, the company register. Extract of 4 September 2026.