3 November 2020 | Münster
Iulia Stroila, team member of the S2BMRC, and alumni of the program International Marketing & Sales is amongst those honoured for their academic achievements at the year's 2020 "Hochschulpreis 2020", an event which awards prizes for outstanding final theses from all faculties of the FH Münster University of Applied Sciences. Stroila's master thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Thomas Baaken and Jun. Prof. Dr. Sue Rossano-Rivero has been published by Springer Spektrum.
The master thesis entitled "Drivers and Barriers of Women Entrepreneurs: An Analysis of the National and Regional Context Using GEM Data", awarded the prize for the best Master thesis from the Münster School of Business, investigates the entrepreneurial intention of women across four different European countries.
Starting a business of one's own might provide women with important career opportunities and contributes significantly to economic growth, enhanced family, and community well-being. The number of women entrepreneurs is growing rapidly worldwide, however, women are still less likely than men to exhibit entrepreneurial intentions and start a new business.
Two factors influencing this are barriers (inhibitors) and drivers (motivators), however, the understanding of how their interaction affects women's entrepreneurial intention, specifically across different contexts, is lacking. Accordingly, this research focused on two environmental settings, European regions, and countries. It further seeks to understand whether it is the barriers or (and/or) drivers that most impact women's entrepreneurial intention and how the regional or national context influences this.
The empirical analysis is based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2015 nation-wide survey which contains questions about entrepreneurial perceptions of the countries' population. From the original dataset, four "lead" countries within Europe provided a sample of 7,096 responses.
The results show that there is a significant difference in the entrepreneurial barriers and drivers that affect women's entrepreneurial intentions in the European regions. Furthermore, different barriers and drivers were found to significantly affect the four lead countries. With barriers and drivers being able to provide a good explanation of women's entrepreneurial intention in Germany, Spain, and Sweden, there was a more limited explanation of entrepreneurial intention by Polish women. The article contributes to the literature of contextual entrepreneurship and the understanding of factors influencing women's entrepreneurial intentions.
Iulia Stroila has started as a Research Associate at the S2BMRC in 2019 and is enrolled as a PhD student at the University of Adelaide; a collaborative PhD program with the FH Münster University of Applied Sciences. Her PhD project "Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Well-Being" is supervised by Prof. Dr. Thorsten Kliewe (FH Münster University of Applied Sciences), Prof. Dr. Carolin Plewa and Prof. Dr. Paul Steffens (The University of Adelaide).