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The study of female entrepreneurship is a dynamic field, with more women than men engaging in self-employment in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Prior research in this field has identified a series of factors which characterize entrepreneurs. This paper examines the extent to which the experiences of Australian women entrepreneurs are reflected in the prior research. In particular, emphasis is placed on whether the personal characteristics, educational levels, motivations for starting business and resource acquisition behaviour of contemporary Australian women entrepreneurs are reflected in the prior research. While many of the key findings of prior research were found to describe accurately the experience of Australian women entrepreneurs, three new factors have been identified. First, Australian women entrepreneurs have increasingly come from business education backgrounds compared to the predominantly liberal arts backgrounds reported elsewhere. Second, the reasons for establishing small business differ insofar as they represent a greater proportion of general business needs as well as personal internal needs. Third, Australian women entrepreneurs are moving away from traditional 'female industries' into sectors identified as 'male industries' such as manufacturing. Overall, Australian women entrepreneurs demonstrate similarities in their identifying characteristics; however, significant shifts are occurring in their behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role and nature of disadvantages associated with part-time working in perpetuating the gender pay gap in the public sector. It does so by means of a detailed case study of local government workers in the UK, with particular reference to the more than one and a half million local government service workers covered by National Joint Council bargaining arrangements. The article draws from original pay data analysis and national survey work conducted by the author. It argues that little has changed since the findings reported 20 years ago by Beechey and Perkins with respect to the disadvantages experienced by part-time workers and the ‘construction’ of employment in gendered ways. However, the role of class may have been understated in previous accounts: class fractions in gender-segregated employment continue to hold deep significance and provide some potential for solidaristic approaches by trade unions alongside traditional ‘equality’ initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More and more women and men are becoming dependent on some form of small business activity for all or part of their livelihoods but there is little research offering insight into gender and working practices in small businesses. In this article we assess some theoretical approaches and discuss these against an empirical investigation of micro-firms run by women, men and mixed sex partnerships. In the 'entrepreneurship' literature, with its emphasis on the individual business owner, we find little guidance. We argue that in the 'modern' micro-business, family and work are brought into proximity as in the 'in between' organizational form described by Weber. The celebrated 'flexibility' of small firms often involves the reproduction within modernity of seemingly pre-modern practices in household organization and gender divisions of labour. This is true in the Britain of the 1990s in a growing business sector normally associated neither with tradition nor with the family. Tradition, however, is never automatic or uncontested in a 'post-traditional society'. A minority of women and men in micro-enterprises actively resist traditional solutions and even traditional imagery of male and female behaviour. For this small group alone new economic conditions seem to bring new freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]