FEMALE VERSUS MALE ENTREPRENEURS

Primary similarities between male and female entrepreneurs could be found in their
motivation for starting their own business. These similarities included a desire for
financial security, a need for autonomy, and a response to the identification of
profitable business opportunities.

However, several studies found differences between male and female entrepreneurs.

BASIS FOR COMPARISON

Male and female entrepreneurs can be compared on the following basis,

1) Marital status

2) Education and background experience

3) Type of business started

4) Opportunity identification

5) Efforts expended in a new business creation

6) Startup problems

7) Confidence in organizing abilities

8) Risk preferences

9) Motivations of business entry

10) Operational differences

11) Personal attributes

12) Family – career conflict

13) Psychological differences

14) Career influences

15) Firm’s performance

1) Marital status
In most comparative studies, male and female entrepreneurs differ significantly on
marital status. In these studies approximately 90 percent of the male sample is married,
with most of their wives assuming a traditional, supportive role. The female sample
tends to be characterized by less stable marriage relationships, with between 50 and 70
percent still married and young, but significant percentages of divorced and single
woman. Generally, husbands are not very much involved in the business.

2) Education and Background Experience

The most significant differences to emerge from these studies are demographic one.
Men & women come to entrepreneurship from very different educational & business
experience backgrounds. For men the decision to start a business seems to follow a
logical progression, but it does not appear to do the same for women.

3) Type of Business Started

Male and female entrepreneurs do not start the same types of businesses. Female led
businesses are more likely to be found in personal services and retail trade and less
likely to be found in manufacturing and high technology. In addition women start
businesses that are less growth-oriented and less driven by opportunity and more
oriented toward wage substitution

4) Opportunity Identification
Female entrepreneurs search for new business opportunities differently than male
entrepreneurs for a variety of reasons. First, many opportunities are identified through
information that is transferred through social networks. Women have different types of
social networks than men. As a result, they have access to different sources of
information about opportunities.

5) Efforts Expended on New Business Creation

Researchers have found that female entrepreneurs, on average, work fewer hours
than male entrepreneurs. Studies have shown that women invest less time in the
development of their new businesses than men. They also indicate that self employed
women are less likely to work fulltime than self employed men.
6) Start-up Problems
Research suggests that social norms about the role of women in society, the shortage
of female role models, and the greater household burdens faced by women led female
entrepreneurs to face more startup problems, and for those problems to be of greater
magnitude, than their male counterparts. Attitude towards the role of women make it
more difficult for female entrepreneurs to be taken seriously as business people.

7) Confidence in Organizing Abilities

Because of how men and women are socialized, women have lower levels of career-
related self-efficacy than men, particularly in careers that are seen as traditionally male.
Because starting a business has been considered a traditionally “male” career, female
entrepreneurs are thought to have less confidence in their entrepreneurial abilities than
male entrepreneurs. As a result, they are less likely to believe that they can undertake
the key in organizing a new venture, such as obtaining startup and working capital and
attracting customers.

8) Risk Preferences
Research in sociology and psychology shows that women are risk averse than men
across a wide variety of settings. Women display greater financial risk aversion than
men. Infect, one study shows that a convenience sample of female entrepreneurs have
lower risk propensity scores than male entrepreneurs on a psychological scale. The
greater risk aversion of female entrepreneurs is thought to make them less willing to
trade potential gain for risk, which leads them to prefer businesses with lower failure
probabilities than those preferred by male entrepreneurs.

9) Motivations of Business
Entry Both women and men in comparative studies indicate the primary reason for
turning to self-employment was in order to have more control over their working lives.
A variety of negative forces can compel individuals to pursue self-employment. In broad
terms, these negative forces exist for both men and women, i.e. displacement,
dissatisfaction with previous employer, liability to find satisfactory alternative
employment, life crisis, etc; however the underlying dimensions of these non economic
factors or influences shape the nature of male and female entrepreneurship differently.
10) Operational Differences
Many of the operational differences perceived male and female business owners
appear to be the same. The majority of the small firm owners, regardless of sex, see
marketing, accounting and financial problems to be the major ones facing their firms.
No study has systematically addressed business concerns on a comparison basis, but it
does appear that women business owners face several obstacles which male business
owners no not appear to encounter.

11) Personal Attributes

In terms of personal attributes, two studies found that women were usually either
only children or the oldest daughters in a family where at least one parent was an
entrepreneur.

12) Family Career Conflict

One study investigated entrepreneurs and family career conflict and found that
females reduce family career conflict by spending less time at work, while males
increase their time at work.

13) Psychological Differences

A comparative analysis of Welsch and young revealed no major differences in
psychological characteristics and perceptions of business problems encountered. No
differences in personality measures were found for risk taking, locus of control,
Machiavellianism, self esteem, openness to innovation, and rigidity. Other studies have
failed to find sex related differences in characteristics such as achievement, autonomy,
aggression, support, conformity recognition, independence, benevolence and
leadership.

14) Career Influences

In a study of 1000 small business owners in the US, women owners were greatly
influenced by their husbands and families in making a career choice.Ninety percent of
women stated they needed the support particularly the emotional support of their
husbands and families. Most of the male business owners in the same study stated that
their families had not influenced their career choice. In addition, husbands often
received credit for their wives small business careers.

15) Firm Performance

Studies have shown that performance of female led new ventures lags behind that
of male led new ventures sales growth, employment, employment growth, income and
venture survival are all lower for female led ventures. Women owned business have
lower sales and employ fewer people than men.

Real Time Example of Male Entrepreneur

A recent graduate of the Lahore School of Economics, Muhammad Amin, has founded
Payload an app that is introducing Bitcoin technology to Pakistani users. Bitcoin is a type
of digital currency used to verify and transfer funds.

With $121 million worth of transactions taking place through Bitcoin every day, the
technology is fast becoming a reliable method of transaction for individuals and
businesses worldwide.

And the best thing about this system is that it’s foolproof – it cannot be hacked. It's fast
and cheap, with minimal transactional fee.

Pakistan is a predominantly cash economy, where many people are not comfortable
making payments via credit cards which makes Payload extremely relevant here. The
start-up is planning to create awareness drives for university students to educate them
about this improved way of transacting.

Real Time Example of Female Entrepreneur

Beauty Hooked allows you to find and book salons and parlors near your location and
avail exclusive discounts for their services.

Labelled a beauty with brains, Sahr Said, the CEO of Beauty Hooked, aimed to create an
online platform for Pakistani women to compare the services of various beauty salons.

The website currently offers discounts in over 30 salons in Lahore and plans to sign up a
lot more in the next few months. What's more, all of its subscribers are top-tier salons.
 ENTREPRENEURS VERSUS INVERTOR

An inventor is likely the most creative individual of the three. Someone who invents a
product is simply looking to create a new product that has never before been made. In
most cases, an inventor isn’t trying to place this invention on the market.

As for innovators, these are individuals who want to create new ideas and new ways of
doing things. An innovator will attempt to improve on a product that may already be in
the market. For instance, every iteration of the iPhone is considered to be an innovation
over the previous iPhone model.

Inventors Create New Products

An inventor is someone who is focused almost solely on creating and building a product,
process, or service that can solve the problems that someone might have. While the
product or service is meant to solve an issue and should conceivably be able to fit onto
the market, inventors don’t usually focus their attention on assessing the market
viability of the product or service that they’ve invented. An inventor strives to perform
cutting edge research that’s essentially never been done before.

When creating a product or service, an inventor will establish a proof of concept for the
product, which means that they will conduct numerous tests to determine if their idea
can be transformed into a feasible product or service. If your main goal is to create a
product or service that’s never been done before, you would likely classify as an
inventor. In most cases, an inventor will have a high amount of technical expertise and
will spend much of their time solving problems. An inventor cannot be successful if they
don’t have patience.

Real Life Example of inventor

To best understand what an inventor is, it’s important to take a look at some of the
most popular inventors throughout history. Among the most notable inventors is
Thomas Edison. While he created many successful inventions throughout his life, none
was more influential than the invention of electric light via the light bulb, which he
invented in 1879.
A couple of other inventors you’ve likely heard of include the Wright Brothers and
Nikola Tesla. While Nikola Tesla was responsible for the creation of the AC motor in the
late 19th century,

Entrepreneur
On the other hand, an entrepreneur is someone who focuses almost exclusively on
trying to take a product and fit it into a market wherein it can sell to customers or
clients. Entrepreneurs usually create companies surrounding the product that they want
to place on the market, which is why most individuals who create startups are
considered to be entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs Create Companies around Those Products

Entrepreneurs are individuals who are focused primarily on creating a business and
increasing shareholder value. While the business may be centered around a specific
product or service, entrepreneurs want to be able to take the startup that they’ve
created and form it into a successful business that can stand beside the leaders of the
industry. As such, entrepreneurs will usually know more about marketing a product to
investors and prospective customers than they do about creating and developing a
product.

An entrepreneur will also work to identify and develop customer networks that can be

effectively monetized. Since entrepreneurs are the ones who typically create startups,
it’s important to understand that the very first stages of a startup are centered around
determining what market can be reached with the product or service in question.
Successful entrepreneurs are able to reach a wide market through the establishment of
various market channels and teams to carry out delivery of the product or service.

Real Life Example of Entrepreneurs

Some of the most popular entrepreneurs in recent history include Jeff Bezo for Amazon,
Bill Gates with Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook. Each of these
entrepreneurs created businesses that filled a gap in the market and effectively
answered the needs of customers even before the customers knew what they wanted.

Q NO # 03 Characteristics of Entrepreneurship
While there can be as many characteristics of entrepreneurship as there are people in this
world with opinions, there are some characteristics that are considered indispensable or
necessary in an entrepreneur. These are listed here as follows.
Ability to take Risks
This is the first and foremost trait of entrepreneurship. Starting any business involves a
considerable amount of risk of failure. Therefore, the courage and capacity to take the said
risk are essential for an entrepreneur.

Understand the Nature of Business Risk here in detail.

Innovation
In a world, where almost everything has been done, innovation is a priceless gift to
have. Innovation basically means generating a new idea with which you can start a
business and achieve a substantial amount of profits. Innovation can be in the form of a
product, i.e., launching a product that no one is selling in the market. It can also be in the
form of process, i.e., doing the same work in a more efficient and economical way.

Another type of innovation can be the one concerned with usage. For examples, cell
phones are now used for various functions such as viewing, creating and editing various
files and documents, thus, eliminating the need for computers to a large extent.

Visionary
Every entrepreneur needs to be a visionary. Without a vision for the future of his venture,
he or she would just be working aimlessly without reaching any point of success.

Leadership
An entrepreneur has a vision. However, it takes a lot of resources to turn that vision into
reality. One of these resources are the people that the entrepreneur hires to perform
various functions like production, supplying, accounting, etc.

A single person cannot perform all the tasks and therefore it is important to bring some
more people to do it. This also makes leadership very important as a leader provides the
required direction to the efforts of the employees. Without proper leadership, everyone
would be working independently without achieving the desired results.

Open Minded
A good entrepreneur realizes that every situation can be a business opportunity. Thus can
be utilized for the benefit of the organization. For example, Paytm realized the significance
of demonetization and recognized that the need for online transactions was more than
ever during this time and so it utilized and grew massively during this period.

Confident and Well Informed

An entrepreneur needs to be confident about his ideas and skills. This confidence also
inspires the confidence of the people working for him as well as the
other stakeholders involved in his business.