12/10/2007
Differences in Male and Female Entrepreneurs
by Sarah Hays, Graduate Assistant
A recent study by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy examines the differences in business performance between male and female entrepreneurs. Prior research had shown that women-owned firms were performing below male-owned firms in areas such as annual sales and employment growth.
This new study by the SBA sought to understand why this gender phenomenon was occurring and discovered that the previous studies appeared to be biased and limited by the amount of data and number of control variables. While controlling for factors like preferences, motivation and expectations this study showed that gender does not affect business performance but instead affects other elements of entrepreneurship. Based on the sample group from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), this study concludes that that the educational backgrounds of male and female business owners were similar.
Additionally, female business owners were more likely to prefer low risk/return businesses that yielded positive revenues while male owners spent more time searching for business opportunities. Male entrepreneurs also spent more time on their new ventures than female owners, however; this could be attributed to the fact that women entrepreneurs had larger average household size. To learn more about the findings of this study, a full copy of the report is available at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs309tot.pdf and the research summary can be found at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs309.pdf.
Recent | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Subscribe right now to our FREE
bi-monthly E-News service!
You will receive articles two full weeks before they appear on the Arkansas SBDC web site!
