Assessing Reasons for Choosing Entrepreneurship: A Study with Reference to Women Entrepreneurs from Punjab, India

Background: The study provides a comprehensive review of the various reasons influencing the growth of women entrepreneurs particularly in selected districts, as the reasons are derived from the literature on women entrepreneurship. Aim: The main objective of this paper is to analyse whether women socioeconomic characteristics i.e., age, and education influence their reasons for choosing women entrepreneurship. Methods: Research Design of the present study is exploratory cum descriptive. A probability sampling method such as stratified sampling method was used at the first stage to select the districts for the study. In the second stage, probability sampling such as random sampling as well as non-probability sampling such as snow ball sampling method was used in selecting the women entrepreneurs as respondents. Setting: The study analysed survey responses of 525 respondents from selected districts of Malwa Region of Punjab, India. Furthermore, the proposed model is tested by using the data collected from Trading, Services and manufacturing enterprises. In this study the researchers have adopted, percentages, mean, standard deviation, factor analysis, kruskal Walis test and Dunn’s test as the data analysis tool. Results: The study revealed that out of four factors i.e. personality, individual social and entrepreneurial factors age plays an important role in case of social & entrepreneurial factors while education influences personal factors. Conclusion: From these results, it is understandable that the requirement for increasing women’s ambition and attitude in different age categories to embark on an entrepreneurial endeavour by nurturing entrepreneurship education.