An Empirical Study on the Gender Difference in Entrepreneurship (original) (raw)

Male and female entrepreneurs differ in the way they operate their business, this difference can be attributed to the type of business they operate, their marital status, kind of family they belong to, educational qualification, the age they started their business and their business experience prior to starting the enterprise. Such diversity among male and female entrepreneurs triggers curiosity to envisage into the depth of its differences and identify reason leading to it. For centuries entrepreneurship has been considered as a proportion for male, till date it is a man's domain. Apart from economists, psychologists have also described entrepreneurs as 'men'. Lights have been shed on women entrepreneurs recently as they progressed in the field which however led to draw differences between the entrepreneurs on gender basis. A panel of 297 entrepreneurs were selected for this study, the entrepreneurs were compared at a founder level to find similarities and differences in their marital status, educational qualification, family structure, age while starting business, nature of business and business experience of the entrepreneurs prior to starting business. As the variables chosen were at nominal level, chi square analysis was applied to analyze difference Bendangienla Aier, E. Nixon Singh-An Empirical Study on the Gender Difference in Entrepreneurship EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH -Vol. IV, Issue 9 / December 2016 7162 between them. Statistically significant difference was observed between gender and type of business, business experience, marital status and family structure of the entrepreneurs. However educational qualification and age at the time of starting the business were found to be independent of gender.