Fostering female entrepreneurship : the development of a model of formal and informal factors
Creators: name: Berthel, Simone
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2022
Subjects: 305: Personengruppen (Alter, Herkunft, Geschlecht, Einkommen)
658.4: Leitendes Management

description: Women are becoming increasingly involved in the creation of successful companies, and entrepreneurship is slowly approaching gender parity. However, in many countries around the world, significant gender disparities in business creation persist. On average, women are only involved in one-third of start-ups. This highlights the existing inadequacy of efforts to support the development of female entrepreneurship, which offers a huge untapped source of economic growth.

To bridge the gender gap in entrepreneurship, this study examines which formal and informal factors are required to foster female entrepreneurship. The aim was to address the dilemma of causality, namely whether social norms or the institutional framework need to be adjusted first or as a priority before the other factor can follow. Institutional economics – which defines the relationship between institutions and society – provides the theoretical framework for this study. A mixed-methods research approach was adopted for data collection, involving semi-structured interviews with nine women entrepreneurs from Switzerland and five women founders from the United Kingdom, as well as the evaluation of a questionnaire.

While informal factors seem to be more important for women who want to develop their own businesses, the results of this study show that institutional regulations are likely to be faster and easier to control. In addition, participants agreed that the government system for promoting female entrepreneurship is already quite comprehensive in many highly developed countries, and that cultural reforms are needed more urgently.

Female business owners today face cultural challenges such as the pressure to prove themselves more than their male counterparts, an ideal image of the entrepreneur that is inhibiting for women and does not encourage them to start a business, and a lack of tangible female role models. Educational opportunities that promote the entrepreneurial mindset and cross-gender networking, support services for women's access to external capital, childcare programs for entrepreneurs, and the availability of female mentoring schemes are some institutional factors that need to be further strengthened to achieve a cultural shift towards gender equality in entrepreneurship. Women born in a supportive entrepreneurial environment seem to be less affected by such unfavorable cultural and institutional factors.

The findings of this study were incorporated into a conceptual framework aimed at fostering female entrepreneurship. Based on the needs of women who aspire to or have already established their own companies, formal and informal factors are suggested to support them in their efforts. Moreover, the proposed factors are intended to stimulate an entrepreneurial mindset among women who have not previously considered it as a career option, with the goal of increasing the number of women-owned businesses.