Focusing on emerging markets, this paper compares the motives behind the entrepreneurial activities of women within and across national boundaries. The research builds on the opportunity-necessity ...spectra and explores the interaction of four types of entrepreneurial motives: (i) becoming independent; (ii) gaining financial rewards; (iii) the lack of employment alternatives; and (iv) multiple motives. Panel data from 25 emerging market countries for the seven-year period between 2010 and 2016 are tested through a staticapproach comparing fixed and random effects followed by dynamic analysis using the generalisedmethod of moments estimator. The findings reveal that financial rewards (maintain/increase income) encourage women towards international entrepreneurship, whereas necessity-driven motives (lack of job alternatives) lead women to start businesses in their home countries. Additionally, nonfinancial desires (such as becoming independent) have a negative impact on both domestic and international entrepreneurship by women.
Women, particularly minority women, remain underrepresented in entrepreneurial activities and continue establishing ventures in low-growth sectors. This qualitative research explores ethnic minority ...female entrepreneurs' experiences by focusing on why women might choose entrepreneurship as a career choice and their constraints. The study adopts a social constructionist approach, specifically narrative design. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with ten minority female entrepreneurs who founded ventures in Sri Lanka. Thematic analysis was used, and the transcripts were reviewed and explored, codes created, emerging themes identified, and interpretation with explanation building undertaken. Findings revealed that perception of ethnic discrimination discourages some ethnic minority businesses from applying for bank loans. As a result, female entrepreneurs perceive higher financial barriers to their business. Moreover, the results highlight the importance of transnational family networks within all aspects of the business and suggest that these links can sometimes provide a fertile source of new business ideas and limit innovation and decisions shaped by cultural norms. The findings can support facilitating and promoting entrepreneurship among ethnic minority female entrepreneurs. It could be valuable to further our understanding of the role of ethnic minority females and their experiences of combining entrepreneurship and business.
Purpose This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity ...entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Design/methodology/approach We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country. Findings After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies. Originality/value This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.
This study investigates the role of institutions on female entrepreneurial activity in Saudi Arabia, using institutional economics as the theoretical framework for developing the hypotheses. Primary ...data were collected and used to analyse the role that institutions play and continue to exercise in developing entrepreneurial activity among female citizens. The findings indicate that the most significant barriers to involvement in entrepreneurial activities for Saudi women are a fear of failure and intervention policies, while their perception of existing female business owners and the support they receive from their families mediates their ability to become entrepreneurs. The study also investigated female perceptions of lifting driving banning, though it showed no significant impact on their probability of becoming entrepreneurs. The results will aid policy makers and future research seeking the institutions' effect on female entrepreneurship in the Middle East and Gulf regions.
This paper examines the emergence of digital entrepreneurship in the context of emerging economies. Given that these economies generally lack a well-developed institutional framework, we draw on the ...concept of institutional voids as our theoretical lens. We argue that digital entrepreneurship facilitates the navigation and bridging of socio-cultural institutional voids but also provides opportunities for entrepreneurs to directly and indirectly alter the existing institutional context. We illustrate these arguments by drawing upon six biographical narrations of female digital entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, through our development of a multi-level model, we make explicit the two-way causal interaction between entrepreneurial action, institution altering behaviour and the social and cultural context, thus providing a framework for future research.
•Women's digital entrepreneurship - we demonstrate that digital technology can have significant emancipatory potential.•Institutional voids - we focus on the informal rather than formal institutional environment.•A micro-meso-macro framework to examine the relationship between entrepreneurial action and institutional context.
This paper aims to explore transnational entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on the processes of exploring and exploiting opportunities across borders for female entrepreneurs in the modest ...fashion industry. Modest fashion (MF) -conservative and non-revealing clothing- provides an understudied and relevant research context in which it is possible to analyse the role of transnational communities and their culture, in addition to the role of religious values, in entrepreneurship and –more specifically- in female entrepreneurship. The study is based on multiple case studies of female transnational entrepreneurs (FTEs) in the modest fashion industry, using an exploratory and grounded research methodology. The findings illustrate that FTEs cope with their multi-layered identities and transform them into entrepreneurial opportunities. They leverage their transnational family and transnational community for international opportunities' exploration and exploitation, while they leverage the emergent transnational MF ecosystem for international opportunities' exploitation. This study contributes to studies on international entrepreneurship and, more specifically, sheds light on a less explored case of transnational entrepreneurship. For instance, it underlines the role of religious values in the process of transnational entrepreneurship, from the opportunity perspective. It also responds to recent calls for research in contextualising entrepreneurship by highlighting the role of cultural and gender variables in exploring and exploiting international opportunities across borders.
This paper addresses the general lack of research on high-growth women's entrepreneurship by investigating the influence of gender on Technology Transfer – TT processes managed in Young Innovative ...Companies – YICs (new firms with high-growth potential). The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it investigates whether male or female entrepreneurs are better at bringing innovations onto markets by testing the relationship between participation in R&D activities, employment of expert researchers and holding a patent (independent variables) and performance (dependent variable). Second, it investigates the causes of differences, if any. For this reason, a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (able to disentangle the error term into technical and random inefficiencies) considering 10,676 YICs operating in Italy in 2019 is conducted. Results confirm the influence of gender (only holding a patent is significant for female entrepreneurs) and reveal that differences between male and female entrepreneurs depend on random inefficiencies.
Further data-driven analyses, regarding 1394 female entrepreneurs, exhibit a reverse U-shape relationship between holding a patent and performance as the percentage of female property increases. In terms of originality, this paper remarks that Italian female entrepreneurs need to collaborate with male entrepreneurs in order to maximize the results of TT processes in their YICs.
•The paper investigates the effect of gender on technology transfer processes•Male and female entrepreneurs behave in different ways when managing innovations•A stochastic frontier analysis reveals the causes of gaps from efficient behaviour•A reverse U-shape relationship exists between female property and holding a patent
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