Making Virtue out of a Necessity: Women’s Entrepreneurial Motivation in Disadvantaged Areas. An Investigation Based on Generations

The study of entrepreneurial motivation has undergone a remarkable development in recent decades. Entrepreneurship scholars have shown a particular interest in understanding of the reasons that lead to entrepreneurial action in contexts characterised by considerable resource constraints. In relation to these contexts, many studies have drawn on push-pull theory to argue that necessity (push) or opportunity (pull) related motivations explain how entrepreneurial intention is formed. As part of the debate on entrepreneurial motivations in disadvantaged contexts and adopting a gender perspective, this paper aims to explore the motivations of women entrepreneurs leading young ventures. Their entrepreneurial action is not only subject to the vulnerabilities generally ascribed to young ventures and to the resource constraints of the territory in which they operate, but is also hampered by an additional obstacle in the form of gender roles, which involve behaviours not typically attributable to entrepreneurship. In particular, on the basis of a sample of 74 women entrepreneurs, we investigate the varying intensity of entrepreneurial motivations with reference to different groups definedon the basis of generations. For this purpose, a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was carried out. The results showed that younger women entrepreneurs generally had higher values for the entrepreneurial motivations considered. Looking at individual items, significant differences were found in several cases, which can be traced to both necessity and opportunity motivations. Thus, we cannot claim that generational diversity alone implies a different intensity of necessity or opportunity motivations. Rather, we believe that younger women are generally more entrepreneurially motivated, and if well educated, they are able to proactively seek out opportunities, even if they decide to start a business out of necessity, as a way of escaping precarious work or the risk of having to emigrate from their home country.