K-means clustering for profiling the rural women entrepreneurs in India

Abstract

Women entrepreneur has been recognised during the last decade as an important untapped source of economic growth. Challenges in the path of women entrepreneurs are lack of skills and training, lack of confidence, problems of long term and short term finance, socio-cultural barriers, production problems and inefficient marketing arrangements. There are many women running successfully irrespective of the above said problem. So this research helps to identify the various types of Indian rural women entrepreneurs based the business success attributes. After reviewing the literature of women entrepreneurs, we performed a segmentation analysis of rural women entrepreneurs in India. First, a hierarchical cluster analysis was carried out, and then K-means cluster analysis identified three meaningfully differentiated rural women entrepreneurs' groups. Further, a classification tree analysis was performed to identify the attributes that differentiated the clustered groups. Finally, three clusters of Indian rural women entrepreneurs namely: relationship oriented entrepreneurs, multitalented entrepreneurs and experienced entrepreneurs are identified.