Feminist Lens on Gender Roles in Entrepreneurial Intention and Implementation

Based on social feminist theory, post-structural feminism and gender-role orientation (GRO) (masculinity, femininity and androgyny), the aim of this research is to study the entrepreneurial process through the lenses of both biological sex and socially constructed gender, in order to disentangle their effects and to shed new light on the process. Secondly, we aim to push forward the research on the early-stage entrepreneurial process by going beyond entrepreneurial intention. We achieve this by including the entrepreneurial implementation intention construct as an important intermediate step between intention and actual action, thus filling the intention–action gap. We propose a model of the entrepreneurial process consisting of four ordered elements, namely: general risk propensity, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurial implementation intention. In order to verify the model and to investigate the influence of gender-role orientations on each of the model's constituents, we employ structural equation modeling. Additionally, we use multigroup analysis to compare males and females. This is done on a group of more than 670 students from Polish and Latvian technical universities. Our research empirically confirms the proposed model of the entrepreneurial process. Biological sex influences risk propensity and entrepreneurial intention while having no impact on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial implementation intention. Using GRO provides more insight as we observe that among all individuals masculine GRO reinforces all elements of the entrepreneurial process, whereas feminine GRO does not, with the exception of perceived risk propensity, but only among females. Finally, androgynous GRO has the most varied effect out of all three GROs. Both theoretical approaches explain the lower entrepreneurial intentions of women, which are due to early socialization and experiences shaping social gender, as well as the attribution of entrepreneurship to the male sphere of activity. Finally, our study shows that using both biological sex and social gender concurrently provides more insights.