Gendered Accountability Gaps: How Accounting Practices Shape the Differential Resilience Capacities of Women-Led Enterprises During Economic Disruption in Ghana

This paper investigates how accounting practices and accountability structures influence the resilience of women-led enterprises during economic disruption in Ghana. It introduces the concept of gendered accountability gaps to explain how formal and informal accounting systems reflect masculine assumptions about asset ownership, financial formality, and creditworthiness, thereby limiting women’s capacity to withstand and recover from shocks. The study uses a qualitative phenomenological design and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with twenty-eight women entrepreneurs operating across five Ghanaian cities and five sectors. Participants had experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 currency depreciation, fuel and food price shocks, and Ghana’s IMF debt restructuring programme. Additional evidence came from entrepreneurial diaries, voluntarily shared mobile money records, and observations at two susu meetings. The analysis identifies five gendered accountability gaps: invisible capital, collateral accounting, the double accounting burden, social protection exclusion, and the community accountability advantage. These gaps affect absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience in different ways. Their effects are further shaped by the intersections of gender with class, geography, sector, and informality. The study is limited to Ghana and to micro and small women-led enterprises. Comparative African research is needed. The paper offers a new framework for understanding how accounting systems reproduce gendered resilience vulnerabilities and centres the lived experiences of Ghanaian women entrepreneurs within international accounting and resilience research in emerging economies.