Is there a (fe)male approach? Understanding gender differences in entrepreneurship

Ingrid Verheul (1975) graduated in Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1999. She started writing here PhD. thesis on female entrepreneurship in 2000. In addition to female entrepreneurship, her research interests include determinants of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. Her work has been published in several international scientific journals including Journal of Business Venturing, Small Business Economics, International Small Business Journal and International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education. She is co-editor of the book: “Entrepreneurship: Determinants and Policy in a European-US Comparison” published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002. \nToday research and policy have been more and more fuelled by the idea that female entrepreneurs are important for economic progress. Not only do female entrepreneurs have an important contribution to employment creation and GDP, they also seem to have value through increasing entrepreneurial diversity. Together with the growing number of female entrepreneurs throughout the world in the last decades there has been an increase in the number of studies on female entrepreneurship. Because most of these studies focus upon female entrepreneurship in Anglo-Saxon countries, the understanding of the characteristics of female entrepreneurs and the existence of gender differences in other developed countries is limited. The present thesis investigates gender differences in entrepreneurship using (predominantly) data from the Netherlands. Different aspects of entrepreneurship are studied including the individual, the organization and the environment. A systematic distinction is made between direct and indirect gender effects on entrepreneurship to be able to disentangle ‘pure’ gender effects and effects of factors that are correlated with gender. Findings indicate that female and male entrepreneurs differ with respect to a range of aspects such as self-perception, time investments, start-up capital and HRM. Most of these differences can be attributed to indirect effects, although some evidence has been found for direct gender effects.