Volume 12, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Gender and Entrepreneurship; Guest Editors: Thomas Lyons, Chandra Mishra, Ramona K. Zachary

Despite the tremendous growth in research on gender stereotyping in the context of entrepreneurship, scholarly understanding of this phenomenon is far from complete. Accordingly, the overarching goal of this paper is to stimulate greater attention to topics that warrant fuller consideration. Of the many paths worth pursuing, we focus on those that we term “Investigating Intersectionalities”, “Mapping Masculinities”, and “Revealing Rationales”. In our coverage of each, we describe the recommended route’s essence and intellectual origins, summarize extant work within the entrepreneurship literature, and raise illustrative questions for future research. We hope our efforts to demarcate these paths encourage their pursuit.

The topics of gender and entrepreneurship have been of great scholarly interest since the eighties. In this invited editorial, we provide an overview of the evolution of the field of gender and entrepreneurship. Specifically, we consider the evolution of the field by highlighting the importance of context and the need to consider gender in all future research examining’ entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on a contextualized approach we provide an overview of the six articles in this curated special issue with the aim of increasing our understanding of women’s entrepreneurial activity. Finally, we conclude with some suggestions for future research. We hope this invited editorial will spur deeper research at the intersections between gender and entrepreneurship.

This paper explores women’s entrepreneurship policy and practice in three different countries: Canada, Ireland and the U.S. We focus specifically on policies relating to access to financial capital, and ask: How are ‘access to financial capital’ policies and practices operationalized at national and regional level? We draw on institutional theory to identify gaps in policy and practice, and to highlight similarities and differences between countries. We contribute a novel perspective on women’s entrepreneurship policy by drawing attention to the underlying institutional pillars and the importance of institutional fit in informing a coherent and future-looking policy framework. Our findings enhance understanding of how ‘access to financial capital’ policies and practices geared toward women entrepreneurs reflect different institutional contexts.

When women entrepreneurs experience family-to-work conflict, it may discourage them from adopting an entrepreneurial orientation, an effect mediated by work-related emotional exhaustion and moderated by both family-to-work enrichment and family support at home. According to survey data collected among women entrepreneurs in Ghana, negative interferences of family with work can steer women entrepreneurs away from adopting an entrepreneurial orientation for their company, largely because they feel emotionally overextended by their work. However, enrichment of their work, attained through family involvement, can buffer this detrimental effect. The buffering role of family-to-work enrichment in turn is particularly effective when women entrepreneurs receive help on household tasks from other family members. This study accordingly identifies a key mechanism by which family-induced work strain can hamper bold strategic actions by women entrepreneurs—because they feel emotionally drained at work—and details when this mechanism is less prominent, namely, in the presence of relevant family resources.

Extant literature of women entrepreneurial intention (EI) has not studied the interplay of push and pull factors well, creating a lacuna in literature. In this paper, we explored how barriers within their professional careers, i.e. push factors led to women EI, and how interpersonal motivators and contextual pull factors moderated that relationship. Adopting the push-pull framework and analyzing survey-based responses from 302 working women using structural-equation-modeling, we find that the need for recognition (NFR) and the glass ceiling (GC) effect have positive relationships, whereas family support (FS) has a negative relationship with EIs. Moreover, the NFR and FS moderate GC-EI relationship. Our study contributes towards the women entrepreneurship literature by focusing on the interplay of push and pull factors. The paper also provides important managerial and policy implications for organizations and policy makers.

Given the importance of entrepreneurship for economic development through social and economic transformation, entrepreneurship education and training (EET) is growing throughout the world. The research on EET is also expanding and there is a need to better understand the impact of EET on business performance and its differential effect in men and women. Accelerators are entrepreneurship EET programs. Based on human capital theory, the paper uses Accelerators to assess the impact of EET programs on startup business performance. Given that female entrepreneurs’ human capital attributes are different from those of men and that the various components of Accelerator programs have been found to produce a differential effect on women, the paper proposes that Accelerators have the potential to produce a more pronounced positive effect in startups founded by female founders. We test this conjecture by exploring the impact of Accelerators in startup fundraising, in which female entrepreneurs face a significant gap. Our results confirm that female entrepreneurs who go through Accelerators increase their chances of receiving Venture Capital financing and that the marginal effect is larger for female than for male entrepreneurs.

In a better attempt to understand nascent entrepreneurship, this paper explores the relationship between opportunity recognition and the entrepreneurial intent of nascent entrepreneurs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, research on this relationship is fragmented and empirically underdeveloped. In addition, the contextual and perceptual boundary conditions of government support, gender, and minorities are explored. We surveyed 1246 nascent entrepreneurs in the state of Florida, which is the largest data set on this topic in Florida. Respondents answered 55 survey questions on potential barriers to entrepreneurship to help understand how their context impacts their intent to start a new business. Our empirical results indicate that opportunity recognition by nascent entrepreneurs significantly affects entrepreneurial intent, the strength of which is moderated by government support and gender, but not by minorities. Our study is a direct response to the call-in existing entrepreneurship literature for new research in geographically narrower contexts as the largest survey-based study at the state level in the US that we know of. We extend and demarcate entrepreneurial self-efficacy into a new context while clarifying boundary conditions. Lastly, our dependent variable measures intensity of intention to start a business along a time dimension which empirically narrows the gap between studies on entrepreneurial intention and studies on entrepreneurial action.

In this study, we investigate the obstacles to growth and the mitigating strategies of high-performing (over $1 million in revenues) entrepreneurial businesses, and how these differ between businesses owned by Black and White entrepreneurs and between female and male entrepreneurs. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and qualitatively analyzed using grounded theory and thematic analysis methods. Findings reveal that the lack of access to capital is faced by all groups of entrepreneurs, but that Black and female entrepreneurs additionally faced racial discrimination and gender bias obstacles to their business growth. While all entrepreneurs used social capital strategies to mitigate the barriers to growth that their businesses faced, Black and female entrepreneurs additionally employed faith and prayer as well as business engagement in governmental and corporate diversity initiatives as strategies to overcome the obstacles. Implications of the findings for the entrepreneurial business growth of racial/ethnic minority and female-owned firms are discussed.

Though challenges to female entrepreneurship are widely acknowledged in the settings of developed countries or the context of formal firms, the challenges faced by female informal entrepreneurs in developing markets are less explored. Based on the liabilities of newness and smallness framework in organizational ecology, we draw on a sample of 2562 Brazilian informal firms, to examine the unique differences in the experience of newness and smallness between male and female informal entrepreneurs. With increasing firm age, female informal entrepreneurs realized lower firm revenues (inverted-U), however, the firm age and firm revenue association are linear for males. Informal firm performance did not vary by size between male and female informal entrepreneurs. The distinctive differences in firm revenues for male and female entrepreneurs have implications for informal entrepreneurship.