Are Women Entrepreneurs Different from Men?
Written by J. McGrath Cohoon, Vivek Wadhwa, Lesa Mitchell Tuesday, February 08 2011
Entrepreneurs are arguably the most important actors in our economy: the creators of new wealth and new jobs, the inventors of new products and services, and the revolutionizers of society and the economy. Yet despite their centrality, little is known about entrepreneurs: what motivates them, how they emerge, why they succeed. We know even less about who becomes an entrepreneur, and why. Too often, we take for granted that entrepreneurs simply emerge, driven by some internal motivation or “little voice.” That assumption may be true to some extent. But can we, or should we, simply take for granted that entrepreneurs can’t be made – that they can’t be identified, recruited, mentored, and encouraged?
Women are one particularly understudied group of entrepreneurs. We know very little about female entrepreneurs, and our ignorance of this important demographic is a serious blind spot in any effort to increase the total number of entrepreneurs participating in our economy. What little we do know suggests that women are not nearly as active in the entrepreneurial space as they could be. For instance, according to the Kauffman Firm Survey, which followed a cohort of firms founded in 2004, only about 30 percent of the primary owners were women. Only 3 percent of firms that have a primary owner that is a woman are high tech while the same figure for men is 7 percent, according to data compiled from Dun & Bradstreet.
The Kauffman Foundation has attempted to address this knowledge gap. The data were collected in 2008-2009 from 549 respondents, or about 40 percent of the founders from randomly selected high-tech companies who were invited to participate. The primary data source for this study is a subset of an existing data set of corporate records included in the OneSource Information Services Companies database.
In this study group, women were overrepresented relative to the Dun & Bradstreet findings: 7 percent of the tech firm founders in the sample were women. (Founders were defined as very early employees, typically having joined the company before the products or business model were fully developed.) The value of this study is its detailed exploration of men and women entrepreneurs’ motivations, backgrounds, and experiences. The people included in this sample were all successful entrepreneurs, 59 percent of whom had founded two or more companies.
The data made it possible to compare apples to apples as few, if any, studies of entrepreneurs have done before; the men and women surveyed turned out to be quite well-matched in key respects. Because of the sampling methodology, they were in the same types of industries: More than half the respondents of each gender classified themselves as working in computing or some other highly technical field. The study subjects also had founded their current companies at about the same age and at around the same time.
Kauffman findings show that these successful women and men entrepreneurs are similar in almost every respect. They had equivalent levels of education (slightly less than half earned graduate degrees), early interest in starting their own business (about half had at least some interest), a strong desire to build wealth or capitalize on a business idea, access to funding, and they largely agreed on the top issues and challenges facing any entrepreneur.
The data also identify some small but potentially informative gender differences among successful entrepreneurs. For instance, motivations for starting a business differed slightly between men and women. The latter were more likely to cite a business partner’s encouragement as a key incentive to take the plunge. Women also were more likely than men to get early funding from their business partners.
To read the complete study:
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/successful_women_entrepreneurs_5-10.pdf 
J. McGrath Cohoon is senior research scientist, National Center for Women & Information Technology, and assistant professor of Science, Technology & Society, University of Virginia. 
Vivek Wadhwa is visiting scholar, University of California, Berkeley; director of research, Center for Entrepreneurship & Research Commercialization, and executive in residence, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and senior research associate, Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School. 
Lesa Mitchell is vice president, Advancing Innovation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
