Increasing awareness about the potential of entrepreneurship among women is an important first step to advancing entrepreneurship for all. This chapter discusses policy approaches to creating a more gender-sensitive entrepreneurship culture, including awareness campaigns, role models and developments in the education system. This discussion is illustrated by six policy insight notes from Australia, Germany, India, Iran, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Each note presents and assesses a current policy debate. The chapter draws out lessons from the country perspectives.
Entrepreneurship Policies through a Gender Lens
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OECD Studies on SMEs and Entrepreneurship
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3. Fostering a gender-sensitive entrepreneurship culture
Abstract
Creating a positive image of women entrepreneurs
Despite the advances made in women’s social and economic participation, negative gender stereotypes persist, and gender gaps remain (OECD/EU, 2018). A range of subtle barriers (e.g. gender role assumptions) continue to have negative impacts on gender equality in the labour market, including both employment and self-employment.
Entrepreneurship has long been considered a “masculine” phenomenon and this has been sustained by social and cultural attitudes and norms (Hamilton, 2013). Consequently, women’s entrepreneurship is considered to have a lower level of legitimacy (Ogbor, 2000), which impedes access to resources, such as human, financial and social capital (Brush et al., 2004) and prevents the full realisation of women’s entrepreneurial potential (Marlow and Patton, 2005). Equally as important, the prevailing social and cultural attitudes around gender roles can lead to women self-restricting their business and entrepreneurship activities to certain sectors or professions, and reducing their growth ambitions.
One way that social attitudes are visible is through attitudes towards business failure. Across OECD countries, women were about 20% more likely than men to report over the period 2015-19 that a “fear of failure” prevented them from starting a business (see Chapter 2). More than half of women in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland and Portugal reported that “fear of failure” was a barrier to entrepreneurship.
The role of public policy
Public policy can serve to build a more women-friendly entrepreneurship culture by simultaneously promoting entrepreneurship to women and profiling women’s entrepreneurship more broadly in society. Common approaches include promoting entrepreneurial women role models, publicising profiles of women entrepreneurs through award programmes, and ensuring that family policies support entrepreneurship. The education system also has a critical role in shaping social attitudes towards women’s labour market participation and labour market activities, including entrepreneurship.
Promoting positive role models is one of the important ways in which policy can help to counteract traditional gender roles and encourage more women to consider entrepreneurship as a career. These recommendations help to address the small numbers of women who are identifiable as entrepreneurial role models and off-set stereotypes about entrepreneurs. The need to promote women entrepreneur role models is particularly important in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Women role models can increase the entrepreneurial propensity of other women through positive representation in the media, direct interactions, and through learning materials in training and education programmes (Bijedić et al., 2014).
Policy should ensure that family policies support the participation of women in the labour market, including sufficient availability of child care. Supporting a higher take-up by men of paternity and parental leave could support mothers to return to the labour market earlier and help erode stereotypical perceptions of who should assume caregiving responsibilities, both of which are institutional barriers to entrepreneurship (World Bank, 2012). Recent progress has been made in many countries, including in Iceland and Norway which have established compulsory paternity leave. In other countries, such as Sweden, a portion of parental leave is reserved for the father and is lost if he decides not to take it. Similarly, the availability of childcare (e.g. day care sites) and allowances for parents to pay for childcare can encourage women’s participation in the labour market. However, very few of these measures are aimed at women entrepreneurs directly. Such supports are sometimes available to employees but not small business owners. Consequently, many such policies encourage women to become employees rather than self-employed entrepreneurs.
Education has an important role in influencing social attitudes towards entrepreneurship. It is important to ensure that curricula reform includes positive messages about women and work, where equal entrepreneurship educational opportunities are provided for boys and girls, and gender stereotypes in textbooks and classrooms are eliminated. There is also a need to foster young women’s entrance into programmes and fields of study that are more likely to lead to entrepreneurship and to the creation of innovative, high growth firms. This requires educating women on the gaps in opportunities and earnings in different sectors, and ensuring they have opportunities to access work experiences (e.g. training, internships, mentoring programmes) in sectors that have been traditionally dominated by men.
Lessons from the policy cases
The six policy insight notes in this section cover a range of issues related to building a positive entrepreneurship culture for women entrepreneurs. They discuss strategies to create a supportive entrepreneurship culture for women entrepreneurs (Australia and Germany), ensuring that women play a greater role in innovation (United Kingdom) and the impact of broader gender issues related to labour market participation and society on entrepreneurship opportunities (India, Iran and Turkey). Together, these notes underline three lessons for public policy:
1. Success in closing gender gaps in entrepreneurship is linked to broader policy efforts to close gender gaps in society and the labour market in general. Gender roles in society can have a strong and negative influence on women’s entrepreneurship. This is illustrated, for example, in the policy insight note on India, which discusses the difficulties faced by women such as harassment, and on Iran, where patriarchal norms exert a strong influence on women. The note on Turkey discusses the challenges of women’s entrepreneurship that stem from a lack of access to formal education and cultural norms.
2. Family policies need to continue to evolve to support women’s participation in the labour market and reduce gaps in access to supports between entrepreneurs and employees. Some countries have family support systems that reinforce traditional gender roles. These have a negative influence on women’s labour market participation and entrepreneurial activities. The note on Germany, for example, argues that lack of affordable day care and single-earner income tax policies reinforce occupational roles of women as caregivers, which reduces women’s entrepreneurial activities.
3. Women’s entrepreneurship should be celebrated and supported with more formal and larger-scale initiatives. The policy insight notes show that women’s entrepreneurship has a relatively low status in many countries. Even among top-ranked ecosystems for women’s entrepreneurship, such as in the city of Melbourne, Australia, gender-sensitive supports are limited to mentorship and advocacy. Components of entrepreneurial ecosystems that are characterised by volunteerism are vulnerable to fatigue and turnover among time-stretched workers. Similarly, the note on the United Kingdom illustrates how a programme can be successful in supporting innovative businesses run by women but remains at a very small scale compared with market needs.
References
Bijedić, T., F. Maaß, C. Schröder and A. Werner (2014), “Der Einfluss institutioneller Rahmenbedingungen auf die Gründungsneigung von Wissenschaftlern an deutschen Hochschulen”, IfM-Materialien No 233, Bonn.
Hamilton, E. (2013), Entrepreneurship across generations: narrative, gender and learning in family business, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Marlow, S., and D. Patton (2005), “All Credit to Men? Entrepreneurship, Finance and Gender,” Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, pp. 717-735.
OECD/EU (2018), “Policy Brief on Women’s Entrepreneurship”, OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Papers, No. 8, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/dd2d79e7-en.
Ogbor, J. (2000), “Mythicizing and Reification in Entrepreneurial Discourse: Ideology Critique of Entrepreneurial Studies,” Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 605-635.
World Bank (2012), Global Financial Development Report 2013: Rethinking the Role of the State in Finance, Washington.