This paper examines the impact of gender on access to debt finance among Vietnamese enterprises. The paper investigates data and variables retrieved from the World Bank Enterprise Survey dataset using five Probit models. The regression results suggest that there exist more unfavourable debt financing conditions for women-led firms (WLF), measured as a lower probability of having loan applications fully approved. Firm’s age, working sector, and perception of access to finance as a difficulty are found to have explanatory power on the discrimination. More importantly, the perception of debt finance as a difficulty or firms’ level of confidence significantly explains the variance of the dependent variable of probability of loan approval, or gender effect would be more pronounced if the firm already has a low level of confidence. The paper also contributes in testing for the gender effect on Vietnamese enterprises from different sectors and scale, unlike other prior research papers focusing on specific sectors and/or small and medium enterprises only. The findings are highly useful for Vietnamese credit institutions to set out a specific business policy to attract more WLFs and help promoting gender equality in the working environment, especially in debt financing, which is often neglected in existing regulation and policy frameworks.

Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Methodology
    2.1. Model Specification
    2.2. Sample Overview
3. Empirical Results
    3.1 The Impact of the Aggregated FDI on theDevelopment of Public Service Sectors
    3.2. The Impact of FDI Compositions on theDevelopment of Public-Service Sectors
    3.3. Interactive Analysis
4. Conclusion and Discussion
References

• Hoang Lan HO(International School of Management and Economics, National Economics University) Corresponding Author
• Minh Hoa DAO(Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam Securities Joint Stock Company)
• The Cong PHAN(Department of Economics, Thuongmai University)