Search

Human development cannot occur without women's empowerment. Particularly in marginalized contexts lacking equal treatment between women and men, women's empowerment is conditioned upon their control of financial resources and activities outside their households' tasks, such as entrepreneurial activities. Such contexts have been experiencing the escalation of microfinance schemes of which women have been the main target group. While scholars generally agree on the opportunities that microcredit represents for microentrepreneurial activities, its effective impact on women entrepreneurship, and hence their empowerment, show contrasting results. We aim to contribute to this debate by conducting in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with female members of the group lending model of the microfinance institutions in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The thematic questions of the interviews address, particularly, the social resources (social capital) and economic conditions underpinning the process of empowerment among women's members of peer‐group lending schemes. We find that social capital plays a crucial role for peer‐group lending to be successful in accessing financial resources and loan repayment. However, we detect the presence of empowerment only where a woman uses the outcome of these social capital resources to pursue her entrepreneurial activities and self‐determined goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the motives, challenges, and perspectives of women minority‐ in Kosovo, emphasizing the pharmacy sector. The aim is to identify women minorities' motives for entrepreneurship and challenges. A qualitative methodology is applied to the interviews of ten ethnic Turkish women entrepreneurs. The interview questions focus on their motives, moral and financial support, work–life balance, and other related issues. Findings show many challenges associated with minority women entrepreneurs related to the imbalance of life and work and the lack of government support as a form of facilitation for entrepreneurship. This study fills the gap in theoretical knowledge about women minority entrepreneurs by addressing motivations and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An individual's gender may influence their behavioral preferences as males exhibited a significantly higher risk taking, openness to change, autonomy, and achievement tendencies. Interestingly, older females seemed to possess lower risk taking, creativity, and autonomy than the younger cohort of women entrepreneurs, while age had no influence on personality attributes of male respondents. An entrepreneur's personality preferences were uninfluenced by whether an established business is earning revenue or designed as a profit or nonprofit venture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the social capital of women entrepreneurs in contexts characterized by gender segregation between men's and women's trading spaces is underdeveloped. The literature on women's entrepreneurship and the marketplace in Pakistan is one such example. This article contributes to the literature on the social capital of female entrepreneurs from a critical perspective by drawing on an exploratory case study of women's entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial networks in the Malakand District of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Women's social capital was found to play a crucial role in the survival and expansion of their business activities by facilitating access to the men's trading sphere of the marketplace. It was also found that women exercise active agency in developing cross‐gender economic networks but do so in ways that do not overtly challenge social norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Women are the majority owners in 30% of all privately held firms in the United States. These firms have $2.5 trillion in revenues and employ 19.1 million individuals. However, despite the large number of women business owners, little is known about the motivations that women have for starting their own firms. • This study uses an expectancy theory framework to examine the differences in motivations to start a firm between men and women. We propose that nascent entrepreneurs expend effort toward the creation of a new venture because they believe this will lead to a set of desired outcomes. We further argue that the desired outcomes of new venture creation differ by sex. • Hypotheses are tested using data from the phone surveys of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (n = 441). Our findings indicate that there are significant differences in motivations for starting a new business, with men being motivated by financial gains, self-realization, and autonomy, whereas for women status is an additional significant motivating factor. Our results confirm the explanatory power of expectancy theory in examining entrepreneurial start-up motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]