Women and EntrepreneurshipA review of an empirically and conceptually crippled field

The Case of Greece

Professor Sharon Bolton Dean and Head of Stirling Management School

University of StirlingScotland

UK

The Entrepreneurship Field

• A significant growth in the number of published empirical studies on women’s entrepreneurship

• A recent focus on context – though individual trait analysis remains prevalent

• Heterogeneous – debates continue about what entrepreneurship actually is

• A focus on seeking models of new business creation, with an emphasis on high-end value businesses

• Little nuanced analysis of sector, demographics etc

• Dominance of large-scale, quantitative, empirical studies

• Lack of theoretical advancement in the field

Opportunity or Necessity?

• Autonomy/ creativity• Innovation/ new technologies • Untapped markets• Flexibility/ Work-life balance• Unemployment • Restricted opportunities• Discriminatory workplaces

What makes a Great Entrepreneur?

Individual Characteristics

intelligence, logical reasoning, persuasion, determination, resources, mobilisation and

capacity, vision

The state of play ……..

• Women under-represented globally• Men start, own, and manage businesses

that employ workers, are more lucrative, and introduce more new products and services to the market

• Women found in retail, hospitality and caring services – self-employed/ micro

• Women are less likely to believe they have the skills necessary to become a successful entrepreneur

The Greek Context:Entrepreneurs and SMEs

• SMEs dominate the Greek business economy, accounting for 72% of added value and 86% of employment

• Micro-firms account for 46% of the added value generated by the SME sector (EU average: 37%)

• Low dynamic structure – few entrants, dominated by established family firms and informal financing. Repeats basic structure of Greek Economy – little in the way of export, innovation, growth, employment creation.

• Fear of failure is highest in Europe @ 70% (GEM 2013) (77% women/ 69% men). Of note is high rate of young people who typically are willing to take more risk and innovate.

• The education level of human capital in Greece is high – in the top 20 globally

• Greece has registered the highest level of established business ownership (entrepreneurs running a business for more than 3.5 years) – of all the innovation-driven economies

• Opportunity entrepreneurship is much lower in Greece @ 23% compared to Europe @ 53%.

Entrepreneurship, employment, and Greek women • Employment rates for women in Europe improved over the previous ten years from 56.3% in

2005 to 63.5% in 2014. (Eurofound) and declined in Greece from 46.1% in 2005 to 41% in 2012 (OECD)

• Only 4.6% of females engaged in early stage entrepreneurial activity compared to 8.6% of men (GEM 2013)

• Top line stats mask reality of women’s entrepreneurial activity, labour market participation, motivations, and barriers – informal economy?

• Though Greek women are some of the most educated in the developed world, nearly 40% of female ventures developed out of necessity, not by an effort to exploit an opportunity (IE, 2015)

• 42% of women feel they have the necessary skills, compared to 53% of men (GEM 2013)• Women more likely to exploit new technologies, internationalise, create new jobs and less

likely to close business (Gem 2013)• Majority of women entrepreneurs create direct consumer services (62%) with B2B @ 19%• Women are older when they engage with entrepreneurial activity – 35-44 for women and 25-

34 for men (GEM 2013).• Greek women entrepreneurs amongst the most highly educated in the world with highest

proportion of PhDs in Europe.

Global entrepreneurship monitor (GEM)

The state of play ….

• More than 41,000 new companies were formed in Greece in 2011; most were food or clothing retailers or other businesses not considered ‘entrepreneurial innovators’; approximately 144 of the companies were categorised as entrepreneurial start-ups. There is no data exploring how many of these were started by women….

• Media representation of new business startups as ‘saving’ the Greek economy

• The Greek Woman Entrepreneur face-to-face survey of 300 entrepreneurs highlighted 89% believed there is a lack of support policies and financing for women’s entrepreneurship in Greece

• Greece suffered a 38% decline in SME value between 2008-13.

• Early stage entrepreneurship declined in 2013 from 6.4% (2012) to 5.2%

• Nuanced sector, gender, motivation, constraints data lacking

Support for growth

• Many organisations (public, private and, non-profit) in Greece that support female entrepreneurs through policy, awards, advice, and events

• The Greek Association of Women Entrepreneurs - SEGE is a member of the Committee of Trade and Development of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece (fing), and the Association of Organizations of Mediterranean Businesswomen (AFAEMME)

• Greek Social Entrepreneurship Week, last held in November 2014, provides information to potential entrepreneurs and embeds best practice in their network of entrepreneurs

• The Hellenic Entrepreneurship Award, ‘born out of the belief that Greece’s economic malaise should not deter those with an idea worth pursuing’

But how do we support what we do not know or understand? ………….

Women and EntrepreneurshipAn empirically and conceptually crippled project

•Rationalist individualists – unsexed, self-seeking, self-contained

•Strong convergence of socio-cultural norms – globalisation thesis

•Dominance of large-scale quantitative studies

•Lack of sectoral, institutional and gendered analyses

•Lacking is an understanding of the subjective processes whereby women and men understand, create and use new business ideas/knowledge

Re-imagining women and entrepreneurship

…… rather than the utopia of entrepreneurship without boundaries we see people in different institutional contexts, what might be described as diverse socio-economic models and changing capitalisms, where entrepreneurship can mean very different things and can vary greatly depending on a variety of institutional logics, such as the dynamics of the state, economy, family and work organisations, role models and values. It is important to recognise that there are no universal characteristics of each socio-economic model but that each context is historically constituted and variable; a process of constitution that rests on the actions of key actors who have the power to command resources. Recognising that globally these key actors tend to be men, we can see that within each ‘model’ women’s position and role in society has developed at a different pace and in different directions ……..

Questions ……….

• how do women engage in the process of constituting what we understand as successful entrepreneurship?

• why do they fear it?

• how do they engage in and sustain entrepreneurial activities within a familial economic context

• how are women’s life trajectories affected as they develop new forms of entrepreneurship and in turn how do they affect the society in which they live and work?

• where are women in the entrepreneurship field – what are they doing, how are they doing it?

• why did they enter the entrepreneurship field?

Conceptual crutches …..for the conceptual cripple

• Varieties of Capitalism

• Gender as a fluid process

• Narrative life accounts

• Secondary data