Dr. Jennifer E. Jennings from the University of Alberta shares findings from several of her research studies examining whether women entrepreneurs organize and manage their business ventures in ways that are distinct from those led by men
In two prior OpenAccessGovernment articles, Professor Jennings summarized findings from her recent research on women’s perceptions of their entrepreneurial ability and women’s perceived start-up ease. In this article she shares findings from prior studies on a very different topic — whether women entrepreneurs organize and manage their business ventures in ways that are distinct from those led by men.
Competing claims about gender and entrepreneurship
Dr. Jennings’ interest in whether women entrepreneurs tend to run their businesses differently than their male counterparts stemmed from competing arguments that were popular when she was pursuing her doctoral studies. The more optimistic view was that entrepreneurship would provide women in business with the freedom to do things “on their own terms”, once they were no longer trying to climb the corporate hierarchy in organizations typically led by men.
The less optimistic view was that women who became entrepreneurs would likely end up organizing and managing their ventures in pretty much the same ways as their male counterparts, as a way of demonstrating their credibility in the male-typed domain of entrepreneurship. Professor Jennings has spent much of her 25-year scholarly career conducting research that sheds empirical light on these competing claims.
Attitudes towards business growth
The first academic study published by Dr. Jennings focused on whether women entrepreneurs tend to possess different attitudes towards business growth than their male peers. To address this question, she analyzed primary data collected from face-to-face interviews with 229 active business owners in the Greater Vancouver Regional District of British Columbia, Canada. The findings weren’t exactly as she had anticipated.
Drawing upon different strands of feminist theory, Professor Jennings was expecting that women would be less interested than the men in growing their businesses. The findings from her quantitative analysis, however, did not support this hypothesis. Instead, the female owner-managers were just as likely as their male counterparts to state that they not only wanted to grow their businesses, but also that they were planning to hire in the following year.
Because these findings didn’t align completely with what Dr. Jennings recalled from the interviews she had personally conducted as a member of the research team, she decided to analyze the qualitative remarks shared by the study participants in greater depth. This analysis resulted in two intriguing insights.
For one, the female owner-managers were more likely than their male peers to possess what Professor Jennings referred to as a “maximum business-size threshold”. This was a target size beyond which the entrepreneurs did not want to expand any further. The second key insight pertained to the pace at which the female owner-managers preferred to grow. Many expressed a preference for expanding their business in a slow and steady manner; specifically, at a pace that they found controllable and manageable.
Based on these findings, Professor Jennings concluded that one size—large—does not necessarily fit all business owner-managers. This was an important insight at the time her study was published (the late 1990s), as much prior discourse was based on the presumption that entrepreneurs want to grow their ventures as fast and big as possible.
A full version of the research study can be found here.
Organizational and managerial practices
In a subsequent study, Dr. Jennifer Jennings and her co-authors (Dr. Nancy Langton and Dr. Howard Aldrich) turned their attention to whether small businesses led by women versus men differ in gender-stereotypic ways with respect to organizational and managerial practices. The researchers were somewhat sceptical of the competing claims that were circulating at the time; specifically, that women entrepreneurs would either: a) naturally organize and manage their businesses in a more ‘feminine’ way, or, b) invariably conform to prevailing ‘masculine’ approaches.
Professor Jennings and her co-authors suggested that these competing claims could be reconciled by taking certain contextual factors into account. More specifically, they hypothesized that businesses led by women would be more likely than those led by men to exhibit ‘feminine’ organizational and managerial practices within industries comprised by a higher proportion of female-headed businesses, within businesses comprised by a higher proportion of female employees, and within businesses led by the original founder.
Businesses led by women exhibited the same degree of male-typed and female-typed practices as those led by men
To test their hypotheses, Drs. Jennings, Langton, and Aldrich analyzed other portions of the primary data collected from the above-noted interviews with 229 business owner-managers in the Greater Vancouver Regional District of British Columbia, Canada. Drawing upon theories of gendered organizational archetypes, the researchers used two sets of measures to assess the degree to which each owner-managers business exhibited masculine versus feminine characteristics. The extent of vertical hierarchy and degree of formalization served as indicators of male-typed practices. The extent to which HR practices were accommodating of work-family issues and the degree to which employee relations were relational rather than transactional served as the indicators of female-typed practices.
As was the case for the above-described study, the results of the researchers’ statistical analysis did not support their hypotheses. Instead, they found that the businesses led by women exhibited the same degree of male-typed and female-typed practices as those led by men. This was so even in the contexts that the research team had theorized to be conducive for eliciting gender-stereotypical practices by the female business owners in particular. Even more specifically, Dr. Jennings and her co-authors observed that both the male and the female owners organized and managed their businesses with a mix of masculine and feminine approaches.
To help make sense of these unexpected findings, the researchers conducted a post-hoc qualitative analysis of the responses that the business owners had provided to open-ended questions posed during the interviews. Intriguingly, this additional analysis revealed that the owners tended to talk as if they organized and managed their businesses in gender-stereotypic ways—even though the researchers’ prior analysis had revealed no statistically significant differences in the actual practices implemented within the woman-led versus man-led businesses.
In other words, neither the female nor the male business owners “walked the talk” with respect to their organizational and managerial approaches. Dr. Jennings and her co-authors interpreted this disconnect between the rhetoric and practice as a potential contributing factor to the belief that women “do things differently” than men as entrepreneurs.
A full version of this research study can be found here.
Work-family interface practices
After joining the University of Alberta, Professor Jennings continued to pursue her overarching interest in whether women entrepreneurs tend to run their businesses differently than their male counterparts. Inspired by a provocative new perspective that conceptualized entrepreneurship as a potential means of emancipation from prevailing constraints, Dr. Jennings was curious about applying this lens to gender-related entrepreneurial phenomena within a developed (rather than developing) economy context.
She thus designed and conducted a study set in the economically vibrant province of Alberta, Canada. Following the mixed-method research design implemented in her prior work, Professor Jennings collected survey data from 163 owner-managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) located with the province’s two largest metropolitan districts, supplemented by in-depth interview data collected through face-to-face interviews with 25 of the survey respondents.
Professor Jennings then invited her colleague (and marital partner), Dr. Dev Jennings,
and their doctoral student, Manely Sharifian, onto the research project to help analyze and interpret the data. Of the hypotheses that these researchers examined, one predicted that
women business owners in a developed economic region would be more likely than their male counterparts to enact work-related practices that departed highly from the behavioural norms predominant within traditional corporate workplaces at the time.
These behavioural norms consisted of working long hours, taking on ever-increasing work responsibilities, and prioritizing work over family. As such, Professor Jennings and her co-authors measured the extent to which each participant worked less than 40 hours per week, put limits on business-related activities, and minimized work-to-family interference.
To their surprise, the results of their statistical analyses provided no support for the gender-related hypothesis. The female business owners were not more likely than the male business owners to either work less than 40 hours per week or put limits on their business-related activities. Moreover, it was the male business owners rather than the female business owners who were significantly more likely to minimize interference between the work and family spheres. The researchers thus conducted a series of post-hoc analyses to help make sense of the unexpected hypothesis-testing results.
One post-hoc exploration involved conducting a finer-grained analysis of the survey data to determine whether certain types of female business owners were more likely to enact practices that departed highly from the behavioural norms predominant within traditional corporate workplaces. This analysis revealed that the women entrepreneurs with a preschool-aged child at home were significantly more likely than the other entrepreneurs to do so.
Notably, this was not the case for the male entrepreneurs with a preschool-aged child at home; instead, these business owners exhibited minimal departure from the prevailing corporate norms of working long hours, taking on ever-increasing work responsibilities, and prioritizing work over family.
A comparison of the qualitative interview remarks shared by the participants who had a preschooler helped shed light on the striking gender differences summarized above. In the case of the male business owners who were fathers of a child this age, each indicated that his spouse either stayed at home to look after the child or had scaled back her career to a part-time basis.
In sharp contrast, none of the female business owners with a preschool-aged child had a stay-at-home spouse. As a result, they were ‘free’ to deviate from prevailing corporate practices by working less than 40 hours a week, putting limits on business-related activities, and thus minimizing the amount of interference from the work to family domain.
The post-hoc findings summarized above also shed light on one additional noteworthy finding from the supplemental analyses conducted by the researchers. Upon checking for gender differences in the psychological outcomes experienced by the entrepreneurs, Dr. Jennings and her colleagues found that the women were less likely than the men to report high levels of overall satisfaction when their business-related practices departed highly from those predominant within traditional corporate workplaces. The researchers thus interpreted their findings as offering evidence to question the extent to which entrepreneurship is emancipating for women in developed economy regions.
To read the full academic article, please click here.
Summary and implications for public policy
Taken together, the research findings that Professor Jennings has described in this article offer mixed evidence with respect to the overarching topic of whether the organizational and managerial practices enacted by female entrepreneurs differ from those enacted by male entrepreneurs. Gender-stereotypic differences are apparent when entrepreneurs talk about their attitudes towards business growth or how they organize and manage their business. The work-related practices that female and male entrepreneurs actually enact, however, are more similar than different.
It is important to note that female entrepreneurs with a preschooler at home are an exception to the preceding summary statement. Unlike their male counterparts with a child of the same age, many of these women reduce the time spent on their business by taking deliberate actions to restrict their venture-related commitments (such as turning down new customers and/or new projects from existing clients).
Although these practices are associated with less interference from the work to family domains, and exhibit greater departure from the predominant corporate model from which many entrepreneurs claim to desire emancipation, women business owners are less satisfied than their male counterparts when they deviate highly from normative practices. Given that the female entrepreneurs who deviate more highly from such practices are those with preschoolers, their lower satisfaction seems to be stemming from structural circumstances that impose gendered constraints on their freedom to run their businesses in the manner that they would prefer.
When considered collectively, the findings from the above-summarized research conducted by Dr. Jennings and her colleagues possess two key implications for public policy at the nexus of gender and entrepreneurship. The first underscores what many policy-practitioners working at this nexus are likely to have already heard. This is the importance of considering the differences that exist amongst women entrepreneurs—rather than only those that may exist between such women and their male peers.
The second key implication for policy practitioners working at the gender and entrepreneurship nexus may be one that has not yet been voiced as frequently. This is the importance of taking into account the differences between how entrepreneurs talk about how they run their businesses and what they actually do in practice. Although female and male entrepreneurs may talk about their ventures in gender-stereotypic ways, their businesses may not actually differ in such ways in practice.