they are classified as mixedowned if the shares of women and men are the same eg companies owned by couples and if neither men nor women alone account for more than of the shares eg a company owned by women by men and by a nonphysical 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 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 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