Research on Women Entrepreneurs: Challenges to (and from) the Broader Entrepreneurship Literature?

Abstract

This paper has three overarching objectives. The first is to document the development of the body of work known as women's entrepreneurship research. The second is to assess the contributions of this work, specifically vis-à-vis the broader entrepreneurship literature. The third is to discuss how this broader literature poses challenges (both difficulties as well as opportunities) for scholarship on female entrepreneurs. We approach these objectives from the standpoint of informed pluralism, seeking to explore whether and how women's entrepreneurship research offers extensions to—and can be extended by—general research on entrepreneurs and their ventures.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the excellent research assistance provided by Qin Han and Kurtis Letwin as well as the financial support provided by a University of Alberta McCalla Professorship awarded to the first author. We would also like to thank Helene Ahl, Howard Aldrich, Andrew Corbett, Kim Eddleston, Patricia Greene, Karen Hughes, and Dev Jennings for their encouragement and helpful suggestions. We are especially grateful to our handling editor, Royston Greenwood, for pushing us to reflect even more deeply upon our subject matter.

Notes

It should be noted that this may not be the case in all countries. Georgellis and Wall (2005), for instance, reported similar self-employment rates for women and men in Germany.

It should be noted that Verheul and Thurik's (2001) analysis of Dutch firms did not find any significant differences in the type of financial capital obtained by female versus male entrepreneurs.

Likewise, self-employment income tends to be lower for women than men (e.g. Budig 2006; Hughes, 1999, 2005; Hundley, 2001; Prime Minister's task force on women entrepreneurs, 2003; Robinson & Sexton, 1994).

For exceptions, see Chaganti & Parasuraman (1996), Fischer et al. (1993), and Kalleberg and Leicht (1991).

These journals consisted of (alphabetically): Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, ETP, Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research, JBV, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Small Business Strategy, Small Business Economics, and Venture Capital Journal.

On this note, we would like to point out that several men (e.g. Howard Aldrich, Donald Bowen, Stan Cromie, Robert Goffee, John Hayes, Robert Hisrich, Richard Scase, and Don Sexton) were amongst the earliest women's entrepreneurship scholars. It is also noteworthy that all but one of the refereed articles published within the most recent special issue of ETP on women's entrepreneurship research (i.e. Hughes et al., 2012) was co-authored by at least one male; indeed, men constituted almost half (i.e. 7 out of the 16) of the authors included in this collection.

We utilized the February 22 2012 version of The Financial Times Top 45 Publications list, retrieved from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3405a512-5cbb-11e1-8f1f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2F2w1tJZL.

Our search term for the comparative general entrepreneurship articles in AMR and AMJ consisted of “entrepreneur”, “small business”, “business owner”, and “small firm”. The above-noted articles were the only ones identified within two years prior to the publication of the corresponding women's entrepreneurship articles.

As one of our friendly reviewers pointed out, however, this could be attributable to the conspicuousness of women's entrepreneurship articles within these top-tier outlets.

The Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference was founded by Babson College in 1981 and currently attracts more than 300 scholars from around the world, including many PhD students. The conference proceedings, Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research, constitute one of the most comprehensive collections of empirical work in the field.

It should be noted, however, that Wilson and Tagg's (2010) analysis revealed few differences in how female and male entrepreneurs construe one another.

A follow-up experiment by Fay and Williams (1993) revealed that this was true only for entrepreneurs with university education; when the loan applicants possessed only a high school education, the women were less likely than the men to be approved.

Howard Aldrich is considered a pioneer of women's entrepreneurship research, publishing some of the earliest empirical studies in the area (e.g. Aldrich, 1989; Aldrich, Reese, & Dubini, 1989). He served on the dissertation committee of Jennifer Cliff (now Jennifer Jennings) and encouraged her interest in the topic.

At the time of writing this article, Jennifer Jennings was a Field Editor at the JBV and Candida Brush was an Associate Editor at ETP.