They are classified as mixed-owned if the shares of women and men are the same (e.g. companies owned by couples), and if neither men nor women alone account for more than 50% of the shares (e.g. a company 30% owned by women, 40% by men, and 30% by a non-physical person). In order to assign a gender to the different owners, an algorithm was developed to identify male and female owners on the basis of their first name. The algorithm matches the first names of the owners in the ORBIS Database with a database of 173 000 unique male and female first names by country compiled by the OECD and which expands the one used in Frietsch et al. ( In each country, at least 96% of the owners’ names are identified as masculine or feminine. The main comparability issue is represented by the fact that ORBIS’s coverage of firms is still uneven across countries.