Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Vol. 31, No.

3, 2017 363

Social entrepreneurship, age and gender: toward a

model of social involvement in entrepreneurship

Séverine Le Loarne-Lemaire
Grenoble Ecole de Management,
12, rue Pierre Sémart – 38000 Grenoble, France
Email: severine.le-loarne@grenoble-em.com

Adnan Maalaoui
PSB Paris School of Business,
59, Rue nationale, 75013, Paris, France
Email: a.maalaoui@psbedu.paris

Léo-Paul Dana*
Montpellier Business School,
Princeton University,
2300 Avenue des Moulins,
Montpellier, 34080, France
Email: lp.dana@supco-montpellier.fr
*Corresponding author

Abstract: How and why does an entrepreneur decide to embark in social

entrepreneurship and/or in a sustainable business? While the existing literature
suggests that social entrepreneurs tend to be females and/or seniors, our
findings indicate that these two groups have important differences; based on the
analysis of the verbatim of entrepreneurs, our findings reveal that seniors claim
to enter social enterprises with a conscious willingness to help society, while
female entrepreneurs are less focused on social implication.

Keywords: age; gender; France; seniorpreneurship; social entrepreneurship.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Le Loarne-Lemaire, S.,

Maalaoui, A. and Dana, L-P. (2017) ‘Social entrepreneurship, age and gender:
toward a model of social involvement in entrepreneurship’,
Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp.363–381.

Biographical notes: Séverine Le Loarne-Lemaire is an Associate Professor in

at Grenoble Ecole de Management where she is also the Head of Department
(Management, Technologies and Strategies) and holder of the Research Chair
on Women and Economic Renewal. Her research interest is work life conflict
and sense of work of women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. She has
published several articles in academic journals, edited books in the topics of
entrepreneurship and innovation management and often collaborates in
managerial reviews.

Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

364 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

Adnan Maalaoui is an Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship at PSB Paris

School of Business. His research mainly focuses on issues of entrepreneurship,
and in particular disadvantaged entrepreneurs: elderly, disabled entrepreneurs,
Etc. He works on topics such as entrepreneurial intention and cognitive
approach in entrepreneurship. His portfolio of research interests is diversified
and he is the author of many articles published in academic journals; he also
authored articles that have been published in professional journals and in edited
books.

Léo-Paul Dana is a graduate of McGill University and of HEC Montreal and a

Professor at Montpellier Business School and Marie Curie Fellow at Princeton
University. He holds the title of Adjunct Professor at the University of Regina,
in Canada. He formerly served at the University of Canterbury and prior to that
as a Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD and Deputy Director of
the International Business MBA program at Nanyang Business School, in
Singapore.

1 Introduction

Passion for women entrepreneurship has been growing (Anggadwita et al., 2015;
Ramadani et al., 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). There is, however, a lacuna about the interest of
women entrepreneurs in social issues and we believe this is an important matter –
especially during economic crises – periods during which public bodies struggle to
overcome rising unemployment, while some citizens distrust the business world, with
organisations taking little interest in people (Chanlat, 1990); social entrepreneurship
emerges as a way not only to create jobs but also contribute to the development or
maintenance of the local economy. Democratic governance is also supposed to promote
the well being of people at work (Le Loarne and Noël, 2014).
While financial profit may or may not be an end in itself, a social enterprise can take
the form of various legal structures, with an environmental and/or social purpose. This
may refer to both the so-called social solidarity economy structures, cooperatives in
particular (Dana, 2010; Draperi, 2011), and also to companies in which managers
implement devices that correspond to the definition above, as well as approaches akin to
corporate social responsibility (Martinet and Payaud, 2007). Our article is concerned with
the latter.
Research about women entrepreneurship and senior entrepreneurs who started their
entrepreneurial experience after the age of 50 (seniorpreneurs) considers the social
entrepreneur’s ‘gendered’ nature (Levie et al., 2006). Essentially committed to their
territory, creative women who manage companies dedicate their business activity to local
development in both developed (Notais and Tixier, 2014; Ramadani and Dana, 2013) and
developing countries (Khavul et al., 2009; Mulira, 2012). This approach is said to be
consistent with the findings of female psychology research, claiming that women evince
behaviours in line with caring for others and purveying love, as guaranteeing the health
and well-being of the couple and more generally of family, relatives and friends (Jonas,
2006). However, while Jonas (2006) denounces the social mechanism behind these
findings and exposes its limits regarding women and their emancipation, others criticise
the very results of research in this field, arguing the existence of a bias; researchers are
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 365

alleged to, implicitly and sometimes even unconsciously, adopt a perspective that takes
for granted that women, as opposed to their male counterparts, are endowed with
particular qualities, including paying attention to others (Ahl, 2006). More recent work
on social entrepreneurship (this time locked in a very restricted meaning and limited to
charities) finds that entrepreneurs whose businesses have posted the highest performances
in their field – not just financially – are men, rather than women (Le Loarne-Lemaire,
2012).
Research about seniorpreneurship (Campbell, 1989; Maâlaoui et al., 2012) highlights
the willingness of these latecomers in entrepreneurship not only to seek profit, but also to
act in a meaningful way to contribute to society, an approach akin to a quasi-existentialist
quest (Brasseur, 2012). Thus, senior women entrepreneurship is said to bring society a
two-fold benefit: firstly, it enables women to create employment and professional
opportunities; secondly, it would promote the development of a solidarity system
between generations and between members of the same society. However, though quite
relevant in theory, this phenomenon is still quite unknown.
Our article aims to contribute toward a template for women seniorpreneurs’ views on
their activity and the form adopted by this population’s entrepreneurial activity. Our
qualitative multi-case study, with content analysis, reveals ambiguity. First, our analysis
supports the conclusions of the literature: women are more likely than men to engage in
social entrepreneurship, and senior women would be no exception. For all that, the in-
depth interviews we conducted seem to show this so-called women’s inclination might be
linked more to opportunism, related to their training, education, and experience than to a
genuine altruistic approach, particularly among ‘junior’ women. Among seniors, the
difference between genders seems insignificant; therefore, our research tends to confirm
the finding that entrepreneurs’ social interest should be analysed by entrepreneurs’ age
variable rather than their gender variable. Our argument is constructed as follows: in the
first part, we give an account of the literature on social entrepreneurship, social enterprise
and the way the literature describes the social entrepreneur. In a second part, we take a
critical standpoint, and, in an abductive approach, we specify our research protocol: it is
based on an analysis of the way women (whether seniors or not) and older men talk about
their business practices. Thirdly, we present the results of the confrontation between these
discourses and the conclusions of various bodies of literature in social entrepreneurship
and women’s entrepreneurship. To do this, we propose an exploratory model of
senior female entrepreneurs and their interest in social entrepreneurship. We then
highlight that their decision to create a social enterprise may rather pertain to
opportunism and to what resources women have to detect activity opportunities. Besides,
it may be more relevant to take into account the criterion of the person’s age than the
contractor’s gender to explain the nature and degree of his/her social involvement in their
company. Finally, we discuss these results in our last part, and the implications our work
can have on future research about women’s entrepreneurship – especially on the
contributions regarding the concept of generativity to understanding women’s
entrepreneurship.
366 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

2 Social entrepreneurship: between gender and age?

2.1 Social entrepreneurship and social enterprise

Social entrepreneurship often refers to the creation of an enterprise that aims to initiate
innovation and social change (Drucker, 1985; Leadbeater, 1997); yet, the literature seems
divided on the very definition of social entrepreneurship (Martin and Osberg, 2007;
Peredo et al., 2004; Petrella and Richez-Battesti, 2014). Some consider that the term
‘social entrepreneurship’ is a tautology because, in essence, an entrepreneur has a social
purpose, embodied in the creation of a sustainable activity resulting in jobs and wealth
creation within a population (Bacq and Janssen, 2011; Fayolle and Matlay, 2010).
Moreover, the literature allocates two different connotations to social entrepreneurship: a
qualified one, considered as a social activity, often non-profit; and a broader one, which
refers to the social enterprise.
In a narrow sense, social entrepreneurship refers to firms with a social purpose, as
defined by Thompson et al. (2000, p.328): “(The social entrepreneur is) a person who
finds an opportunity to meet not yet met needs that the state system cannot meet or has
still not satisfied and, therefore, brings together the necessary resources to use them
wisely and ‘make a difference’ to fill the need”. This definition needs further clarification
and authors, through the examples they explicitly mention, refer to charities, meant to
help disadvantaged people in a roughly bounded area: not only teaching them to read and
providing medical assistance but also helping the elderly. This form of entrepreneurship
is to be distinguished from the so-called business entrepreneurial activity (Thompson,
2002; Vega and Kidwell, 2007).
In its second sense, social entrepreneurship refers to any process of starting and
managing an enterprise “regardless of the chosen legal structure, (whose) purpose is
social, societal or environmental, and whose financial profit is not an end in itself but a
means only; in which governance is participatory, and that evolves according to the needs
of the territory and is therefore unlikely to relocate” (APCE, 2014). It therefore includes
all forms of the social enterprise but also extends to social joint ventures (Martinet and
Payaud, 2007) that balance the profit imperative and the social feature of the company, as
defined by Defourny (2001) and Defourny and Nyssens (2007). In this article, social
entrepreneurship is to be understood in that latter sense.
Hence, the social enterprise is defined by two sets of criteria (Defourny, 2001). The
first category of criteria is economic. There is
1 a continuous activity whose purpose is to produce goods and services
2 a high degree of autonomy resulting in the entrepreneur and his team being truly able
to make independent decisions
3 a significant level of economic risk, reflected in investments and meeting a
profitability imperative
4 a minimum number (unspecified by the authors) of paid jobs.
In addition to these criteria, the social enterprise is also identified by predominantly
social criteria:
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 367

1 an explicit aim to benefit the community

2 an initiative on a group of citizens’ part
3 a decision-making power not based on capital ownership
4 a participatory process involving the various parties involved in the activity
5 a limitation on profit distribution.

2.2 Social entrepreneurship: related to gender

When asked, “Who creates and manages the greatest number of social enterprises?” a
common reply is that women do more than men (Hernandez et al., 2012; Levie et al.,
2006). Certainly, on a statistical level, women are still underrepresented in the
entrepreneurs’ population, but they are more likely to create social enterprises, as
confirmed in the UK, where 46% of social enterprise creators are women, though they
represent only 27% of ‘traditional’ entrepreneurial activities (Levie and Hart, 2011). In
addition, the same study would make it possible to sketch a typical profile the female
social entrepreneur, again in the UK: she would be relatively young, i.e., under the age of
24, with diplomas, a resident in the same area for over ten years, from an ethnic majority
group and a male or female entrepreneur’s daughter.
The authors report that both explanations are consistent with the results of other
research on women entrepreneurship. First, according to research, they are less tolerant of
risk-taking, financially in particular (Jianakoplos and Bernasek, 1998); however, social
activities are allegedly treated as local activities, with a ‘more human’ size, and involving
more restricted financial investments than in companies with exclusively lucrative
purposes (Fletcher, 1998). Secondly, women entrepreneurs, unlike their male
counterparts, are less motivated by the lucrative dimension associated with running a
business (Boden, 1999; Burke et al., 2002; Lombard, 2001) and by the growth imperative
(Cliff, 1998).
Yet, they would be more interested in attracting their relatives’ recognition for what
they do (Lee-Gosselin and Grisé, 1990). Therefore, in societies where empathy and care
given to others are considered feminine values it seems logical that starting and running a
social enterprise can meet women’s desire for recognition, consciously or not. However,
beyond these works, the reasons why women create a social enterprise still seem obscure
and uncertain. Is it a display of their determination to engage in social activity? Has it to
do with the desire to create a business in order to move away from a measure of
determinism? Current studies are, to our knowledge, still silent on the subject.

2.3 Social entrepreneurship and age

According to Stangler (2009), seniors start enterprises more often than 20- to 34-year
olds. It gets even better: 50- to 64-year olds launch a greater number of start-ups than do
20- to 34-year olds. Age aside, they are characterised by three-dimensions (Maâlaoui
et al., 2012, 2013). Firstly, they reflect a desire for their entrepreneurial experience to
evince continuity with their previous lives; they seek to maintain a degree of balance in
their lives (Safraou, 2009) and exercise an activity allowing them to feel important, to be
part of a structure they belong in (Kim and Feldman, 2000), identical to the one they had
in their previous jobs. Secondly seniorpreneurs, more than any other population, reflect a
368 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

desire to socialise. Thirdly, the seniorpreneur’s last feature is often the desire to do
something useful for society.

2.4 Social entrepreneurship among senior women

Starting a business is part of a career dynamic and a life cycle (Levesque and Minniti,
2006). This dynamic differs according to individuals, depending on age, health and
aversion to risk, but is imposed in the same way on men and women, although women’s
entrepreneurship rate remains below men’s. Minniti et al. (2005) reports that women in
so-called high-income countries start up later than their counterparts in countries with
lower incomes; this can be explained by both spending more time in education, a better
network or a perceived career plateau at the firm the woman works in (Minniti, 2009).
In the context of social entrepreneurship, in the restricted sense discussed above, the
trend seems to be different. Again according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, it
would seem that, in the UK, founders dedicate less time on creating and managing a
social enterprise than they would running a for-profit-only company. This is how Levie
et al. (2006) explain why young women entrepreneurs, likely to have children, would to a
greater extent rather turn their hands to creating a social activity. Thus, older, i.e., over
45 years of age, English women who choose to start a business would be more attracted
to creating business-oriented enterprises. To our knowledge, similar studies have not
been conducted in other countries, so we cannot generalise these results. If, however, the
latter were to prove generalisable, they would contradict the findings on seniorpreneurs
and their willingness to creating meaningful activities for their families and society.
As a conclusion to this literature review, research suggests that women entrepreneurs
might be more involved in starting and managing social activities, just like senior
citizens. These decisions would still be ambiguous: has it to do with the desire to be
useful, or to feel useful and recognised, or both? Whether the founder is a man or a
woman, studies conclude with contradictory findings regarding the ages most favourable
to social enterprise creation or management. What form does this social enterprise take?
Faced with so many questions, we chose to adopt a critical stance as advocated in recent
research on the impact of gender on managerial practices (Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008;
Le Loarne-Lemaire and Gnan, 2015). This position means we chose to adopt an
abductive approach (Weck, 1989) and implement the research protocol presented below;
the literature review does not allow us to generate proposals but provides what Martinet
and Payaud (2007) call ‘heuristic reasoning’.

3 Our study

3.1 Research protocol

Our goal is to characterise the motivations leading to creating and managing a social
enterprise in the broad sense of the term and build a comprehensive model for it. To this
end, we proceeded as follows. In accordance with this type of approach and echoing calls
for better grasp of entrepreneurship on a daily basis (Dana and Dana, 2005; Welter,
2011), we opted for a qualitative approach, based on discourse analysis and the declared
views entrepreneurs articulate about their businesses. As noted by Dana and Dana (2005,
p.86), “qualitative research seems especially appropriate for exploratory studies in
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 369

entrepreneurship research. Its use could help in generating new theories to help formulate
better policies for the future”.
All of our participants came from the same network, that of the Réseau Entreprendre
(Entrepreneurship Network), which includes 10,000 entrepreneurs members or laureates
in France and shares a common goal: to support each other and ensure their companies’
sustainability. Currently, this group represents one of the largest French associations
dedicated to coaching and supporting business creation and growth. The choice of the
entrepreneurs we met was made randomly in the context of a research project on female
entrepreneurship: different names were submitted by various regional officials, based on
the criteria of the entrepreneur’s age and sex at the time their company was launched. Our
sole request was only to interview an equal number of people among three categories, to
enable us to make a comparison: older women, older men and women who started their
businesses before they became seniors and still do not belong to this age category. The
sample, consisting of 27 people, is summarised in Table 1. It is consistent with those used
to generate theories and explanatory models (Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt and Graebner,
2007; Langley, 1999), particularly in women’s entrepreneurship (see Nikina et al., 2012
for a complete review).
Table 1 Composition of our sample

Age of
entrepreneur
Year of
Gender Activity Category at time of
creation
creation of
firm
1 F 1987 Distribution of business Woman – junior 20
office products
2 F 1991 Business translation, language Woman – junior 22
training by telephone and
desk help expatriates
3 F 2006 Home design Woman – junior 39
4 F 2008 Coaching Woman – junior 40
5 F 2007 Smartphone applications Woman – junior 38
6 F 2000 Company portage Woman – senior 42
7 F 2007 Company portage Woman – senior 45
8 F 2008 Tea room Woman – senior 61
9 F 2010 Consulting (specialisation: integrating Woman – senior 50
disabled people into companies)
10 F 2008 Services (reception and high-end Woman – senior 54
customer support)
11 M 2009 Surveillance, security and safety Man – senior 63
12 M 1983 Pneumatic automation Man – senior 66
(design and construction)
13 M 2011 Food distribution Man – senior 53
14 M 2005 Leisure Man – senior 50
15 M 1984 Crafts – art metalwork Man – senior 51
16 M 2008 Coaching of managers Man – senior 53
370 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

Table 1 Composition of our sample (continued)

Age of
entrepreneur
Year of
Gender Activity Category at time of
creation
creation of
firm
17 M 2011 Coaching Man – senior 55
18 F 1990 Restaurant Man – senior 55
19 M 2009 Coaching in entrepreneurship Man – senior 63
20 M 2006 Consulting Man – senior 52
21 M 2009 Consulting Man – senior 62
22 F 2009 Distance and shared secretariat Woman – senior 60
23 M 2010 Consulting in quality management, Man – senior 62
safety and environment
24 M 2009 Communication Man – senior 59
25 F 2009 Consulting in business development Woman – senior 57
26 F 2010 Translation Woman – senior 58
27 F 2006 Consulting in acquisitions Woman – senior 50

The data collected from this sample consists of a face-to-face interview performed by our
team, with a minimum duration of one hour and a half and up to three hours. The context
remains the same for all interviews. The interviews were voluntarily open, aiming at
presenting an in-depth and thorough presentation of entrepreneurs – their origins,
education, training and professional experience, before and during the creation of the
business – complete with their personal and professional contexts when creating their
companies; the origins of this creation – where the idea comes from, how it has been
exploited, who has funded the creation of the company – and the everyday management
of the business. Each interview was recorded and transcribed in full and verified by us.
While completing this research on social entrepreneurship, each respondent was
contacted again for a second interview (20 minutes or longer), allowing him or her to take
up again an aspect of the initial interview and react to the transcript of the interview they
had been previously given.
We used NVivo software to analyse our data. Coding was done with no
pre-determined items (Weck, 1989). We focused on three dimensions:
1 the accounts of their motivations for starting the company
2 their spontaneous discourse on the everyday management of a company
3 the assisted discourses on the social dimension as perceived by the entrepreneur as
part of the management of the business.
The verbatim transcripts thereby collected enable us to get the entrepreneur’s freely
expressed vision of the meaning he or she conferred to the creation and management of
the business, but also allowed us to characterise the social nature of the company, as
described in accordance with Defourny’s (2001) nine criteria. As per Dana and Dumez
(2015, p.167), “Every moment of a qualitative research must actively give rise to
surprising facts and findings – which is difficult but also stimulating”.
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 371

3.2 Findings
Langley (1999) lists the different ways of rendering the findings of a qualitative analysis
to assess whether the data analysis has been done properly – according to two criteria that
he deems irreconcilable: firstly, the salient results similar in all the studied cases and, on
the other hand, results accuracy as regards each case. We followed his advice, aligning
ourselves on the styles of published research in entrepreneurship based on ‘abductive’
approaches (Khavul et al., 2009; Nikina et al., 2012), and therefore opted for a
presentation designed to prove as accurate and consistent with the case as possible.
The results are presented as follows. Initially, we categorise the social approach
declared by the entrepreneur, based on Defourny’s (2001) criteria as presented in the
literature review, and try to identify which traits are common to these statements in
relation with the two features we are interested in: the entrepreneur’s gender and age.
Secondly, we show that these characteristics alone cannot account for everything, and
that items relating to past experience – which include education and work experience –
have an impact on their social approach, but so would the nature of the activity developed
by entrepreneurs.

3.2.1 Gender
It seems that some women, whatever their age, are more socially involved than their male
counterparts; their business is very much person service-oriented (company portage,
accompanying the employee, etc.). Finally, from the cases we studied, the last form of
social entrepreneurship by a woman is protection of and commitment to small
shareholders), and they tend to share the profits of the company. For most, especially
younger than 45-year old women, the social dimension is inherent in any business
activity that involves jobs creation: their awareness or even pride of generating jobs by
creating and managing an activity.
In contrast, men seem less inclined to commit to a social enterprise, in that they do
not seem too keen on sharing the fruit of their profits: men can, ex-post creation, develop
enthusiasm for others, provided their own financial situation and the performance of their
newly created company have proved satisfactory. This link between the entrepreneur’s
gender and involvement in social entrepreneurship could be strengthened in
seniorpreneurs, insofar as most of them work in the service to the person industry.
However, in this population category, women and men both seem to approach their
entrepreneurial involvement with a relational agenda, resulting in the formulation of
similar statements, as shown in these two verbatim, among others: “It enables me to listen
to others and see how we can help” (Case 6, a female entrepreneur, specialising in
portage). “Through my work, I help people... maybe they will help me one day”
(Case 16, a male entrepreneur in mentoring leaders).

3.2.2 Age and the perception of social commitment and social involvement
To characterise the impact of the woman’s age, we have delineated the social character of
senior and younger women entrepreneurs in two respects: first, the nature itself of the
activity (service to the person or not) and, secondly, the meaning these women confer to
their business mission on a daily basis.
372 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

There seems to be a difference between young female entrepreneurs aged under

40 when they started their business, and older women: while 100% of senior women’s
activities can be directly related to social entrepreneurship related to assistance to the
person, the same is not true of young entrepreneurs’ activities: the latter develop more
‘varied’ activities, based on product development, consumables sales, decorating
services, etc., and most importantly, do not engage in revenue sharing or exchanging with
citizens to generate ideas towards providing useful services to society, to use Defourny’s
(2001) criteria. However, some of these women are very proud that they create jobs and
actually contribute to the development of society. This is not true of the interviewed
senior women entrepreneurs, as they all manage their activity on their own, without
hiring employees.

3.2.3 Training, past experience, and the perception of social commitment

This section presents the results on the comparison between on one hand the nature of the
activities carried out by the entrepreneurs we met – both men and women – and on the
other the perceptions they have on the social nature of their activities as well as the way
they handle the activity. We only focused on women entrepreneurs who say they have a
strong social involvement, either on account of the nature of their activity, or by the
social involvement they claim they have in their daily practice as entrepreneurs. These
cases therefore involve 20 interviews out of the 37 interviews in our sample.
We note, first, that women entrepreneurs in this case had all, except one (Case 9),
started their business based on their skills and previous training. In other words, the fact,
for example, of advising minority shareholders in their approaches to assets sale, or offer
counselling and aid to expatriates, seems to be directly related to these women’s training
and experiences: the first had been trained in market finance and corporate finance and
had herself been a minority shareholder for several decades, while the second has been
trained to work as an interpreter and had worked in real estate. The collected verbatim
reinforce this conclusion: again, with the exception of only one (Case 9), all the women
entrepreneurs we met, regardless of their age, explain their choice of activity by a process
related to their past existence. They were directly motivated by their realisation, in the
context of their former occupation, that they wanted to carry on the business they were in
formerly, but self-employed, without having to report to a boss.
However, closer reading of both the entrepreneurial motivations spontaneously
expressed by these women and the meaning – especially social – they give to their daily
entrepreneurial experience would suggest qualifying this conclusion: in the vast majority
of cases, women seem to have a personal and family vision of their entrepreneurial
motivation and claim to have selected and exercised their entrepreneurial activity for this
reason. Some verbatim excerpts from Case 10 illustrate this:
For 20 years, I wished I could start my own company, so here I was: I had got
to the point where I could no longer work in a company context and, anyway,
there comes a time when one has to prioritise number one. (...) I needed
availability. It was something I had wanted for a long time, which also offset
my loss of income and, since I had a right to compensation, I really needed to
launch into this adventure.
This phenomenon is found especially among senior women while in younger ones, two
distinct discourses can be heard: both very close to the one we have just mentioned. To
illustrate, we mention the case of a woman who, at 40, created a job cooperative as a
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 373

SCOP. For 10 % of the interview (coverage rate restituted by NVivo), she explained that
her priorities were to have a monthly €1,500 income, while “she needed to be free every
Wednesday to care of her two children (...) and a job that is not more than a 10-minute
walk from her home”. Her social commitment, manifested in both the nature of the
activity – aid to employability by creating an entrepreneurial activity – but also by the
very nature of the company’s status – a job cooperative, the flagship of the so-called
Social and Solidarity Economy (Draperi), could only be accounted for this way, she
claimed:
My colleague and I used to be employed at (name of town) as accountants in a
poorly managed cooperative. So, when it went bankrupt, we bought out all its
shares and since all the requirements were met, we got on with it.
The second discourse we identify in younger women entrepreneurs has nothing to do
with creating an activity with a social purpose but mainly to create jobs (Case 1 and
Case 2) as illustrated in Case 1, involving an entrepreneur who, at the time of the
interview had just sold the shares of her office supplies distribution business she had
created with her husband and still employs 200 people:
Indeed, (she was talking about social involvement), it enabled us to generate
jobs and when the company was struggling I was reluctant to lay off staff.
Being an entrepreneur is of course being responsible for the staff, to help them
grow, and I really enjoyed that part of it! However, we also had to take care of
the bottom line.
Such discourse might also well be explained not so much by age (since all the discourses
women of the same age formulated do not all point to the same direction) but present
similarities according to training or possibly by coupling age and training. Indeed, the
younger women who report their social involvement is motivated by jobs creation and
helping staff to growth and improve their performance all hold management training at
least undergraduate.
That said, senior women cannot be said to actually have no interest in others as they
also seek to work for others and help them... except that the “others” they have in mind
are usually close relations, especially descendants, their children for instance, as
illustrated in the following verbatims:
I have two shareholders, who are my two older children (Case 26).
During the assisted interview, she added: In a way, I represent minority
shareholders and I help the company survive. Not bad, hey? (Case 27)
My children? I have a daughter. When I started the business, she acted as an
associate to the company. She lives in Paris and she owns all my shares, so that,
when I die, they will be like a gift in her favour. The State will not be entitled
to anything. This is the perfect arrangement. So, my daughter is no problem at
all. (Case 22)
In contrast, older male counterparts seem to give meaning to their activity by contributing
to help future generations, not only their close ones: “We work for the younger
generation” (Case 14); “much has been given to us, so it is up to us to empower the next
generation. – (To give, indeed, but give what?) Well... to ensure that, thanks to my
business, I can also train younger people” (Case 16)
374 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

3.3 Toward a model of social involvement in entrepreneurship based on gender

and age variables
An analysis of 27 interviews enabled us to compare senior female entrepreneurs’ declared
social implications with those declared by younger women entrepreneurs and senior male
contractors. It does not claim to suggest generalisable conclusions at statistical level
(Langley, 1999) but permits to sketch a comprehensive model of social involvement in
senior female entrepreneurs, as distinct from situations in junior women entrepreneur and
senior male contractors (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Towards a model of women entrepreneurs’ willingness to launch social enterprises

Experience
Family
/ Education

Economic Criteria:
Junior (1) Continued (social) goods
Woman and service production

(2) Minimum level of paid

employment

Senior
Woman Social Criteria:
(1) Explicit objective to serve
the community

(1 bis) Explicit objective to serve

Senior one’s family
Man
(2) Participative dynamics,
involving the various
stakeholders concerned
by the activity

Social involvement in entrepreneurship can be expressed in several ways. The collected

data and multi-case analysis does not enable us to comment on all criteria of this type of
activity, but only on two economic and two social criteria. We subdivided the social
service objectives criterion into two categories, separating the desired service to the
community and aiming at being of service to the family, especially to offspring.
The entrepreneur’s gender might be a variable explaining the intention to create a
so-called ‘social’ enterprise but could have a more limited impact on the decision to run a
business in a so-called social manner. Beyond this variable, it is not so much the
entrepreneur’s gender that would explain the decision to create an activity in the social
domain as French female entrepreneurs’ training and experience: they are mainly trained
in the field of health or human services or in the humanities. In this sense, women
entrepreneurs, female seniorpreneurs especially might be said to get involved in a social
dimension more out of opportunism than actual willingness.
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 375

4 Discussion

What we propose makes a contribution that hinges around the relative contradiction with
findings proposed in the literature on social entrepreneurship, and thereby deserves
discussing. Furthermore, apart from the need to extend the study and test the
generalisability of this model, our research seems to call for two directions for future
research, if one is to better understand women entrepreneurs’ social involvement: first, it
confirms the need to study this phenomenon not only from the ‘gender’ variable but
relying mostly on the combination of entrepreneurs’ ‘sex’ and ‘age’. On the other hand, it
leads us to reflect on an entrepreneurs’ social involvement in society.

4.1 Female seniorpreneurs’ social entrepreneurship: de facto or desired?

The result we have highlighted is consistent with recent findings that suggest considering
women entrepreneurship – or male entrepreneurship as well for that matter – not only
from the gender variable but rather along with a variable that combines individuals’ sex
and age (Tornikoski et al., 2012; Walker and Webster, 2007). However, it seems to
contradict traditional results on social entrepreneurship and, in particular, the fact that the
latter allegedly result mainly from both a female approach and chosen by relatively senior
people, as described in our literature review and confirm some emerging assumptions that
are raised on the real motivation for women to engage into social entrepreneurship: they
have no choice (Hernandez et al., 2012).
We can put forward several possible explanations. The first is based on the possible
specificity of our sample or possibly on the specific entrepreneurial situation in France.
Beyond the fact that all entrepreneurial activities are not represented in our sample, it
proves to be consistent and to reflect the jobs held by women and seniorpreneurs, in view
of studies published by APCE for example. With respect to the results the GEM releases
every year, we are legitimised to tone down the ‘French exception’ phenomenon, to the
extent that the situation in France seems to be very similar to what can be noticed in other
developed countries.
The last assumption we can put forward might lie in the research methods used to
highlight the social entrepreneur’s results, based primarily on quantitative approaches,
which are themselves based on pre-established constructs: how a social activity is
defined, etc. Our study seems to stand as a continuation of these results, in two ways.
First, it goes beyond the mere description of the activity, by studying the explanations
women entrepreneurs give to justify the choice of particular activities and the meaning
they confer to their entrepreneurial involvement. On the other hand, it promotes
comparing men and women. Ahl (2006) suggested this, to ward off any myopia in the
analysis of female entrepreneurship: the latter has often been described without being put
into perspective with an analysis of male entrepreneurship, while not considering,
nevertheless, that male entrepreneurship is the ‘norm’, or would be closest to the
definition of Entrepreneurship with a capital E.
These results need qualifying because they are based on entrepreneurs’ verbatim
transcripts, hence on the meaning they give to their entrepreneurial experience. Though
talks are deliberately open, based solely on invitations to tell stories about their
experiences and egging respondents on, women, especially older women might be said to
downplay their interest in ‘social matters’, contrary their male counterparts or, on the
contrary, that women have deemed they have largely contributed to a social approach
376 S. Le Loarne-Lemaire et al.

even before creating their business – since we have noticed these women have got
involved in associations, charities and political organisations, as many women
entrepreneurs in our sample do mention the fact in their life stories – so that these women
wish to minimise their involvement or pass their involvement onto a private sphere.

4.2 ‘Generativity’ in seniorpreneurs: a variable worth exploring?

Our analysis highlights some elements relating to seniors, and to older men particularly,
as well as to their interest in contributing to the younger generations’ self-fulfilment. In
retrospect, we could explain and discuss this finding from the concept of ‘generativity’ –
a concept defined as an interest in giving the next generations a leg-up and mentoring
them (Erikson, 1963). There might be two types, depending on the population the
contractor intends to help: parental generativity refers to the desire to help one’s own
descendants, while social generativity means intending to help the younger generation
more generally (Lacroix, 2006).
By highlighting that, women engage to a greater extent in a process of parental
generativity, while men are rather more likely to take a generative approach of a social
type. However, our findings reinforce the results of work carried out on seniorpreneurs in
France (Maâlaoui et al., 2012, 2013). These underline that seniorpreneurs, as a whole, are
concerned about future generations; they want to bequeath their wealth and ensure their
offspring enjoy decent standards of living. It is a form of social entrepreneurship, a so-
called intentional one. Nevertheless, it takes a special character in women: they will seek,
above all, to create and manage a business to serve the community, granted, but their
families more particularly, too. In this sense, these women prove to follow the logic of
‘caring for their own families’ – a quality often attributed to them in the companies we
referred to in our literature review. In contrast, jobless seniors rather turn their hands to
creating their own activity to ensure their families’ (i.e., the people they are responsible
for: wives and children) daily needs are met. Hence, this is a case when entrepreneurship
is said to be de facto, in other words not freely chosen or even unwanted, first off, at
least. Thus, all older women in our sample reported having started their business because
they were looking for a job. Our finding that these women’s social involvement is
motivated by enhancing the legacy they might bequeath their families would be
consistent with research findings.

5 Conclusions and directions for future research

Our research relates to categorising social entrepreneurship by the gender and age of the
person who has initiated it. It aims to better understand women seniorpreneurs’ social
involvement, by offering an explanatory framework. Our analysis supports the
conclusions of previously conducted research: women are more likely to engage in social
entrepreneurship than men – and older women are no exception. Noteworthy is that the
in-depth interviews we conducted tend to show that such an inclination in women would
have to do with opportunism, related to their previous training, education and
experience, more than motivated by real altruistic intentions, especially in younger
women. Among seniors, a difference between men and women would not be identifiable
– except that men declare to be more inclined than their female counterparts to help the
younger generation as a whole, while women’s statements go to prove they take a more
 Social entrepreneurship, age and gender 377

individualistic approach. Therefore, our research raises the hypothesis that social
entrepreneurship might not so much be explained away by the gender variable but also by
the age variable and possibly by training and experience, too.
We could ask whether the results would have been the same if the study had been
conducted within another context? Given that any entrepreneurial situation is
contextualised and research has revealed that the entrepreneurial context differs across
cultures (Dana, 1995) and countries (Ratten, 2006), we assume so, but partly. Indeed, in a
hand, the literature shows evidence that women face the same concerns as regards to
entrepreneurial facts, whatever the country (Ramadani et al., 2013 for instance) and
whatever the culture. On the other hand, markets and entrepreneurial practices tend to
become more international if not global (Dana et al., 2008). Social entrepreneurship is no
exception in this trend (Ratten and Welpe, 2011). In this vein, we assume that our
conclusions are necessary contextualised but can contain generic results. Therefore, this
study confirms the need for more research on social entrepreneurship and similar studies
to test the relevancy of these conclusions within other countries and contexts. These
results call for further work and for careful distinctions between the values that are
supposedly female in society, as these are useful to discuss ‘gender’ and the facts
performed by men or women (Gurău et al., 2015). In addition, they invite furthering the
question of identifying the root motivations behind social entrepreneurship among
women entrepreneurs. They also imply extending Nikina et al.’s (2012) and Shelton’s
(2006) work on the impact of social capital – particularly marital status and family
culture – on senior women’s motivations to undertake socially worthwhile activities.
Finally, our findings highlight that the concept of generativity is relevant to our
understanding of social entrepreneurship, especially among women. They also advise
researchers to engage in more detailed exploration of this concept and of its operating
mechanisms.

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