Intentions for what? Comparing entrepreneurial intention types within female and male entrepreneurship students

Abstract

Entrepreneurial Intention research has become a broad school of thought that can dilute its potential influence on advancing entrepreneurship education. Career-based decisions are commonly made through a holistic evaluation of internal motivations interacting with external circumstances. That-being-said, the common tendency is to reduce entrepreneurial intention (a highly complex social phenomenon) to a commercialised form. This can be particularly troublesome when considering a generational shift that has seen young adults place evermore importance toward non-financial goals such as the search for a positive work-life balance or helping others who are less fortunate. A multiplicity of beliefs and goals can lead to participation in a range of opportunity types suggesting the possibility of holding several types of entrepreneurial intention, that, depending on personal circumstances and contextual situations, will vary in their order of worth. Too much focus on a traditional masculine paradigm of entrepreneurship and less emphasis on other motivations has created a gender bias. There is a pressing need to try to further understand the complexity of proposed differences between potential female and male student entrepreneurs. A body of work now illustrates differences in relation to actions, performance, and values. Nonetheless, findings regarding entrepreneurial intention remain incomplete. In this paper, we narrow focus from asking the question “do you want to be an entrepreneur” to asking, “what type of entrepreneur do you want to become?” Through demarcating entrepreneurial intentions into different sub-types and using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis we account for the varying conditional pathways that females and males have towards specific entrepreneurial intention types. Findings show that gender differences exist at both sample and case levels which have important implications for educational practitioners and policymakers alike.