A Cross-Country Comparison of the Characteristics of Polish and South African Women Entrepreneurs

IntroductionEntrepreneurship development has been identified by many experts as the key to economic success (Luthje & Franke, 2003, p. 135; Veciana et al., 2005, p. 167; Grid & Bagraim, 2008, p. 711). Traditionally, women were not considered as part of the business world as this was a more male orientated sector (De Bruin et al., 2006, p. 568; Bird & Brush, 2002, pp. 41-42) but this phenomenon has begun to reverse in the past few decades. A noticeably growing number of women are becoming involved in the business sector and many new ventures are being started by women entrepreneurs. Research indicates that in the fast growing sector of individual and collective entrepreneurship, women may hold the key to advancing the slowing global economies (McAdam, 2013, p. 3). Entrepreneurship has been a popular topic for decades and vast amounts of research on this field have been done, but it was not until the late 1970's that gender specific research was initiated (Greene et al., 2003, p. 1). Although there might be some entrepreneurship traits, characteristics and management styles that are the same regardless of gender, it has been proven by leading experts in the field of female entrepreneurship that there are clear differences in growth patterns, financing strategies, industry choices and motives for starting a business (Bird & Brush, 2002, p. 43; Greene et al., 2003, p. 2; Brush et al., 2006, p. 586; Carter et al., 2006, p. 1). Furthermore, researchers have found that women are more risk and debt averse, that some women might need more assistance with regard to self-esteem and confidence than male entrepreneurs and that women face different structural obstacles, lifestyle issues and individual embedded mindsets when compared to men (Carter et al., 2006, p. 1; Botha et al., 2007, p. 164; Barsh & Yee, 2011, p. 6). Bird and Brush (2002, pp. 47-50) identified the following fundamental differences between male and female entrepreneurs: reasons for starting a business; the choice of business; what characteristics are needed to run a business; how they finance their startups; governance structures; growth patterns and some aspects of the entrepreneurial process. Establishing your own company, most often alone, can be very difficult. Therefore, certain characteristics are important to overcome problems attendant to conducting business. The purpose of this study was to identity the most important characteristics that women entrepreneurs felt they needed to have as part of running their businesses. This was done by making use of similar qualitative studies conducted in Poland and South Africa, both of which are classified as efficiency-driven economies by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) (Kelley et al., 2016, pp. 97, 104). 1.Literature review1.1. Entrepreneurship definedEntrepreneurship research is still developing as a management science. In investigation, an attempt to introduce theoretical aspects of entrepreneurship with particular reference to the evolution of behaviours of enterprising women was made on the basis of an analysis of literature sources. That it is still developing as a management science is especially visible when entrepreneurship research is compared to the disciplines from which it emerged, requiring it to develop its own methods and theories (Bygrave, 1989, p. 8). Over the last few decades, many definitions for entrepreneurship have been developed. Dating back to the 1930's, one of the earlier definitions by Schumpeter considers an entrepreneur to be an individual who creates new products or services in new or existing markets; he defined entrepreneurship as one of the most important factors of economic development (Schumpeter, 1960, p. 12; De Bruin et al., 2006, p. 586). Kirzner (1985) further defines an entrepreneur as an individual who can optimise information in such a way that it leads to the discovery of new and improved opportunities (Korpysa, pp. 465-477). …