The Wellbeing of Women in Entrepreneurship

A Global Perspective

Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Katherina Kuschel, Nicholas Beutell, Nicky Pouw, Emiel L. Eijdenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000020182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Women accomplish nearly two-thirds of total work around the world (including household duties), comprise one-third of the formal labor force, but women receive one-tenth of the world's income and own only one-hundredth of the world's property. Entrepreneurship is a vehicle for advancing the lives of women around the world. This book brings together 49 distinguished entrepreneurship scholars to provide a unique global vision of the wellbeing of women entrepreneurs necessary for fostering sustainable development and inclusive societies.

Although gender inequality is an important issue, solutions leading to gender parity are far from reaching ideal levels in the formal workplace and globally. Meanwhile the number of women involved in entrepreneurship is growing exponentially because there are more opportunities for women to own a business and be their own boss. This offers women the most desirable and flexible working conditions that better align with women's lifestyles and multiple family responsibilities. However, entrepreneurial activities are demanding and complex; compared to men, women face special challenges that deserve close attention. This book presents research and programs to effectively support women entrepreneurs in reaching levels of wellbeing required to ensure business sustainability and personal prosperity.

Offering a diversity perspectives from around the globe, The Wellbeing of Women in Entrepreneurship is of great interest to academics and practitioners working in teaching and research in disciplines including business management, entrepreneurship, oganizational change, human centered management, human resources, sustainable development, and women's studies.

Part 1

The Americas

1 The multiplier effect of wellbeing of women entrepreneurs

A practical approach and a personal account

Maria-Teresa Lepeley

Introduction

In his pioneering 1934 book, “Theory of Economic Development”, J. A. Schumpeter defined entrepreneurs as “those free spirits who will change the world and their creativity will displace old structures and will replace them with new ones”. Schumpeter created entrepreneurship. He coined the concept “creative destruction” to couple innovation and entrepreneurial drive as necessary condition for progress, economic growth, and human centered sustainability. He stresses that entrepreneurial forces daunt power concentration and monopolies with potential to deter markets that make societies thrive. In the 21st century Clayton Christensen’s theories of “Disruptive Innovation” have emerged strong (1995) along many other scholars consolidating the link between free spirited people, innovation, entrepreneurship, and human centered sustainable development.

Since an early stage, or since I am able to remember, my mantra was aligned with R. W. Emerson’s “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” and embedded in Schumpeter’s free spirit. Today I include these quotes in my professional signature. I am unable to say whether nature or nurture imprinted me with this kind of free spirit, but I recognize that I had a father who supported and encouraged me to travel roads other women of my generation were afraid to follow. Most women of my generation were fearful to fail and were frightened to be chastised by deviating from traditional social norms and cultural expectations about the role women should play. I learned early in life that I could take different roads if I respected others as I would like others to respect me. I also became aware that following new paths meant taking risks that could lead to failure. And I learned from my collected mother the importance of responsibility and personal accountability for the results of actions taken. I discovered that failure may have a positive side. This helped me assume responsibility for improvements that helped me advance, instead of staying in the same place avoiding innovation.

The interest in publishing this book evolved from recurrent evidence that change was necessary to study women in entrepreneurship and overall to assess women’s wellbeing and achievement. This is largely because as development economist I am aware of the very different production functions of men and women, and as a woman entrepreneur I am concerned that the performance of women entrepreneurs is measured with traditional instruments developed to serve and assess men’s standards of entrepreneurial success (profit growth, scalable business, increasing number of employees) that ignore, overlook, and fail to pay attention to the economic and social contributions of women entrepreneurs, which are far beyond starting or managing a business. In contrast with men, women entrepreneurs are responsible to the largest extent, around the world, for household responsibilities that include family care and comfort, childcare, children education, care for parents, and a large variety of other production functions that women entrepreneurs have to carry on daily, aside from managing a startup. In other words, women entrepreneurs have a multiplier effect that is a most significant contribution to their families in particular and the economy and society at large, and this is highly overlooked. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the causes and consequences of the multiplier effect of women entrepreneurs pressing for a paradigm change to objectively measure achievement of women entrepreneurs. The discussion brings to the forefront the importance society and the economy need to place on the wellbeing of women entrepreneurs as a fundamental condition to maximize the multiplier effect of every woman entrepreneur.

The wellbeing of women entrepreneurs and the multiplier effect is a brand new subject in the field. The coordination and production of this wellbeing book is the culmination of two decades of continuous thinking and acting to improve research and teachings to support women entrepreneurs. I launched the idea to produce this book after the successful outcome of a professional development workshop (PDW) session at the Academy of Management (AoM) Conference in Atlanta in 2017. We had organized this PDW with Katherina Kuschel and her colleagues from Canada, Germany, and Peru. The PDW was about the challenges women entrepreneurs are facing around the world today and specifically how entrepreneurial ecosystems are meeting – or failing to meet – the needs and demands of women entrepreneurs. The title of our Session 475 was Women Founders in Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Lessons from Latin America, Canada and Germany. The concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems is an emerging subject gaining momentum. But the relationship between entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world and women entrepreneurs has received little attention. The presentations of our panel of specialists were well-received by an engaged group of participants who stimulated an active discussion. This event made me realize the time had come to organize the publication of a book on the wellbeing of women entrepreneurs. I meant wellbeing as the focus, not as a byproduct.

Taking about the multiplier effect of women entrepreneurs, Katherina Kuschel and I started recruiting chapter contributors during the AoM conference. Emiel Eijdenberg, book co-editor from the Netherlands, became engaged with the idea early on. Nicholas Beutell, former business school dean, joined to provide his vast experience on work-life balance (WLB) and deployment of quality standards. Nicky Pouw, also from the Netherlands, well-versed in wellbeing and an economist like me, came on board because she had authored a chapter in a previous work I had co-edited on wellbeing, Wellbeing for Sustainability in the Workplace (2018), part of Routledge’s Human Centered Management Book Series, which I founded in 2016.

But it was the interest, engagement, and contribution of 49 women and men, specialists highly committed to advance research on the wellbeing of women in entrepreneurship from nations in six continents, who contributed to make this project a reality.

My purpose in this book is to advance a professional goal and a personal responsibility to support entrepreneurs, those free spirits who will change the world with their creativity, as Schumpeter so accurately described entrepreneurs early in the 20th century (1934).

Women and change

As a woman of the Baby Boom generation, I have a particular interest in supporting women because women of my generation went through most drastic changes in the 20th century. During my lifetime women evolved from their traditional, highly dependent roles as daughters, mothers, and wives, with overall responsibility for childcare and household, to become independent, filling new roles in the workplace and opening new spaces in the labor force – roles that until then had been reserved for men as the main breadwinners. This was the situation in Chile, my native country, and it was also and largely the cultural tradition for women across Latin America and until I moved to the United States with my family in 1971. I was then a young married woman with two small children following a husband who had gotten a position at the medical school in an American university. Chilean families have close ties, so originally we came to the United States for two years and planned to go back. But drastic circumstances changed our plans. Our family advised us to stay in the United States to avoid the hardest social, political, and economic turmoil in Chile’s history. We stayed in the United States forever largely because my husband had a strong educational background that provided him excellent professional opportunities in the United States.

Our experience as immigrants and expats, and mine as a trailing spouse, made me identify closely with Kerulis, Tortez, and Mills’s chapter on women entrepreneurs, expats, and trailing spouses. My experience met the characteristics discussed by these authors.

Indeed, I could identify with discussions in numerous chapters. I could see that although I might have been an exceptional case as an entrepreneurial woman in the 1970s, today my trajectory is the norm. Reading chapters in this book induced me to include this personal recollection and some conclusions I have gathered as researcher, entrepreneurship professor, and woman entrepreneur who evolved from a development economist and educator.

Change and transition from education to economics

Although I studied and started my career as an educator in Chile, following a traditional professional path for women, I later transferred to economics. I decided to do this, at the time an extremely unusual disciplinary change, for two reasons. First, I intuited that quality in education was critically important and that education had a much greater effect on the economy and national development that I had deeply missed in my undergraduate and graduate studies in education. And second, my decision was made because, in the early 1970s, Chile went through one of the deepest transformations in economic history. The country evolved from a highly government-centralized, sluggish economy affected by escalating social turmoil at the bottom end of Latin America into the most prosperous and best performing free market economy in the region within a decade. In economics the case became known as the Chilean Economic Miracle. This stimulated me to become a development economist. Given my background in education, I specialized in the impact of education on growth and economic development. My books EDUCONOMY: Unleashing Wellbeing and Human Centered Sustainable Development (2019a) and EDUQUALITY: Human Centered Quality Management in Education. A Model for Deployment, Assessment and Sustainability (2019b) are the result of my multidisciplinary background.

I liked and was proud of my development specialization when I graduated in the late 1980s. That was the good part. But my specialization was unknown. Actually, I was the first University of Miami economic graduate with this specialization. As it happens with new fields, I was unable to find a job in Miami, where we lived at the time. And since I was a trailing spouse, I was unable to move to another city, just as Kerulis and colleagues describe in their chapter. On top of that, I was overqualified for most jobs for which I applied, and, moreover, I lacked work experience because I had taken time off from work during the years I had pursued graduate studies part time to be able to take care of my children. I had two graduate degrees. But a mother’s experience is worthless to enter the labor force. But I have never regretted it. My son and daughter became successful professionals as an engineer and an architect respectively. They were able to find the good jobs I was unable to. My failure? Although it was difficult then, overtime I have to recognize the positive impact I have had on my children and, more recently, on my five grandchildren, showing “my multiplier effect” in my family, the economy and society. In Chapter 8, we discuss causes and consequences of the transition from failure to wellbeing among women entrepreneurs. Katherina Kuschel and I are investigating the fear of failure, which is the next forthcoming subject in the field of women in entrepreneurship.

From entrepreneurial venture to quality standards

Unable to find a job in the late 1980s, I launched a technology entrepreneurial venture with a partner, a family friend from childhood who had studied information technology and computing. I was CEO and managed this international business. I was recently divorced – a life event pretty common among Baby Boomer wives pursuing independence and a professional career.

This was my first encounter with quality management and the quality culture. I assign this encounter most of the achievements I have reached in life. In the early 1990s I was elected president of the Miami Business Economists Association (MBEA), an affiliate of the National Association of Business Economists.¹ In this organization I had the opportunity to meet economists who worked for Florida Power and Light Company, the first American company to win Japan’s Deming Quality Prize² in 1987. I became familiar with Deming’s Total Quality Manage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the editors
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Part 1 The Americas
• Part 2 Europe
• Part 3 Europe – Central Asia
• Part 4 South Asia
• Part 5 Middle East
• Part 6 Africa
• Part 7 Australia
• Index