Abstract
The award-winning DIANA project, established by Candida Brush, Nancy Carter, Elizabeth Gatewood, Patricia Greene and Myra Hart, raised the profile of women’s entrepreneurship as an under-researched academic area with significant potential to inform policy. Following several international conferences, a global international research network has developed which produces high-quality research with policy impact and practitioner import. This book has its origins in the 2010 DIANA International Research Conference held in Banff, Canada, and contains 12 chapters contributed by 26 researchers from seven different countries. The theme of that conference and the resulting volume is, very appropriately, diversity
Following the initial invisibility of women in entrepreneurship research, early contributions tried to add women in by undertaking comparatively framed studies exploring the differences between men and women. This approach was critiqued later for reproducing and reinforcing the gender binary, and for not recognising the heterogeneity of women and their entrepreneurial experience (Ahl, 2006). The extant literature in the field of women’s entrepreneurship research also could be described as anglocentric, having been historically undertaken by North American and Western European scholars. It is acknowledged that women are not a homogenous group but that national cultures, institutions, regulatory frameworks and local gender regimes impact upon the likelihood, motivations and experiences of women engaging in the entrepreneurial process. Therefore, this edited volume advances a more nuanced understanding and exploration of women’s entrepreneurship through recognising the diversity of women’s entrepreneurial experience.
In the contributions contained in this volume, the editors sought to revisit and reframe research questions and explore diversity in methodological approaches In undertaking this task, the book was organised into three distinct sections. The first section explores women’s entrepreneurship in diverse settings, answering calls for greater attention to be paid to the contextual factors influencing women’s entrepreneurship (Brush et al, 2009; Zahra, 2007). The first chapter from Humbert and Essers explores the effects of national context on female migrant entrepreneurs, in a comparative study of Turkish businesswomen in the UK and the Netherlands Using life-history narratives and structuration theory, the authors use the concept of female ethnicity as an intersectional notion to relate women’s entrepreneurial agency to the structures surrounding them and impacting upon opportunity structuration. This provides an interesting consideration of the ‘other’ within women’s entrepreneurship research: that is, ethnic migrant women entrepreneurs. The following chapter (Zohir and Greene) outlines the challenges in obtaining institutional finance for women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in Bangladesh. Despite national policies to promote entrepreneurship, this chapter highlights, using existing panel data and primary interviews and focus groups with women entrepreneurs and institutional lenders, that gendered attitudes within Bangladeshi culture impact upon a businesswoman’s access to finance. While 46 percent of women entrepreneurs had sought finance, only 5 percent had accessed such assistance, with loans to female-owned firms taking two-and-a-half times as long to be processed. The authors offer practical recommendations for policymakers to advance women’s entrepreneurial activity in this context. In the third chapter in this section, Fuentes-Fuentes, Cooper and Bojica explore the intersections between national and industrial contexts using a multilevel institutional approach to study academic women’s entrepreneurship in the UK and Spain. Employing in-depth interviews with female entrepreneurs and individuals responsible for technology transfer and university incubators, the authors advance a set of recommendations for universities to adopt gender-aware policies and practices to assist academic women in overcoming macro-level barriers. This chapter speaks to the wider policy agenda, given the longstanding promotion of science, engineering and technology careers to young women in Europe. The section is completed by Coleman and Robb’s examination of the roles of financial capital and motivations on firm performance in the USA, analysed according to owner gender. Using longitudinal data, the authors test hypotheses derived from resource-based theory and motivation theory to suggest that gender differences in motivation, start-up capital and the desire to control growth impact upon firm performance.
The second section of the book seeks to examine different perspectives or diverse questions. This section certainly illustrates the diversity of research in the field of women’s entrepreneurship. The section begins with a multilevel analysis of the effects of social welfare systems and policy in shaping women’s entrepreneurial activity across countries. Using the Esping-Anderson welfare state typology, Fairclough categorises regimes according to the relationship between the state, market and family to offer propositions for future research and considerations for public policy. The sixth chapter, the second in this section, looks at the the business performance of co-preneurial and non-co-preneurial firms from a family embeddedness perspective. Sharifan, Jennings and Jennings’ findings raise potentially controversial issues for future discussion, such as whether greater gender equity in the domestic realm among such co-preneurial couples might impact negatively upon business performance. The contribution from Hechavarria, Ingram, Justo and Terjesen seeks to explore whether or not women may be more likely to pursue social and environmental entrepreneurship opportunities as opposed to commercial endeavours, and whether women are more likely to place greater emphasis on social and environmental goals in addition to economic goals, in comparison to their male counterparts. This section is completed by a thought-provoking analysis from Riebe of highly accomplished female entrepreneurs’ tendency to ‘give away’ success. Contrary to previous research, these women were found to be less likely to attribute their success to external factors such as luck. Future research avenues such as how women process mistakes, deal with conflict, value relationships and handle ‘silencing’, offer promise in identifying whether these are issues to be overcome, or indeed, a distinctly female approach that may enable women to achieve success and resist ‘giving it away’.
The third and final section of the book comprises chapters utilising diverse approaches, resonating with the call for greater methodological diversity in the study of the entrepreneurial phenomenon (Neergaard and Ulhøi, 2007). The first chapter in this section entitled ‘More gender equality, less women’s self-employment: a multi-country investigation’, uses hierarchical logistical regression on a combined dataset comprising Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index data across 50 countries. Hypotheses from previous qualitative studies relating to gender equality at the institutional level and employment choices at the individual level are tested. The results from Klyver, Nielsen and Rostgaard Evald’s study confirm that countries with high levels of gender equality and family-friendly policies have lower levels of women’s entrepreneurial activity for women of childbearing age. McAdam and Marlow then illustrate the benefits of an interpretist approach through their in-depth case study of roles and identities in a co-preneurial venture operating within the early childhood sector in New Zealand. They explore an entrepreneurial woman business leader and cleverly articulate how a seemingly disruptive positioning of gender roles actually reflects and strategically utilises collectively constructed gendered roles and expectations for business benefit, while simultaneously reinforcing traditional gendered practices and norms.
Cristina Díaz Garcia employs factor analysis from a gender perspective to illustrate that differences in entrepreneurial self-efficacy are not constant or unidimensional, but are context-specific and relate to specific aspects of entrepreneurial self-efficacy: namely, financial, relational and decisional components. These gender differences are shown also to vary by age, business experience, education, business sector and growth intentions. Undoubtedly, this study will inform and influence future research in this area.
The final chapter in this section is a critical contribution by Albert James entitled ‘Conceptualising “woman” as an advantage: a reflexive approach’. Recognising the problematicising of women’s entrepreneurial activity in extant research, James offers a case study of a successful woman entrepreneur in a traditionally male industry to illustrate how women’s identity, competencies and experiences can offer advantage. He then offers an alternative model of female entrepreneurship to enable academics to capture the distinct nature of women’s entrepreneurial activity and promote success at the practitioner level.
The book concludes with the editors teasing out the implications for future research on women’s entrepreneurship that will contextualise it, advance new methods, new questions and, significantly, advocating the continued exploration of mainstream questions and findings in relation to women entrepreneurs’ perspectives and experiences. In its own attempt to contextualise women’s entrepreneurship research, the book contains contributions in each section exploring micro-, meso- and macro-level-influencing factors and units of analyses. As the editors acknowledge, this multilevel approach is consistent with the current approach advocated in the field (Brush et al, 2009; Elam, 2008). Taken as a whole, this book not only illustrates the heterogeneity of women entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial experiences, but also highlights the diversity of ongoing research into women’s entrepreneurship at present. Gender, used as both a variable and a lens for analysis, and diverse methodological approaches combined with well-written, scholarly contributions, ensure that this volume is an interesting and informative contribution to the current body of knowledge that also provides fresh inspiration for future research. To that end, this book has achieved its objectives robustly, resulting in a compendium that undoubtedly will become an essential addition to most collections, and upholding the high standard of the preceding two DIANA volumes.