موانع کارآفرینی زنان. روش های مختلف، نتایج متفاوت؟ Barriers to women entrepreneurship. Different methods, different results?

1 Introduction Recent decades have seen the development of a broad range of ideas, debates and proposals that analyse gender relationships as a means of understanding the economic, social, political and institutional reality (Eddleston and Powell 2008). Such approaches combine to form a new focus in the social sciences. Although this new focus fails to constitute a comprehensive theory, it implies profound changes by rejecting conventional paradigms on account of their bias in the concepts, categories and analytical framework they use (Ogbor 2000). These criticisms of the hitherto dominant research approach have led to a surge in studies into women’s business activity driven by the development in feminist economics. Other milestones include events such as the 1997 OECD Conference on Women Entrepreneurs in SMEs in Paris, which brought together a great number of women entrepreneurs from around the world and succeeded in attracting attention towards the potential, opportunities and barriers related to women’s business activity (Iannello 1993). The current research is built on the model proposed by Akehurst et al. (2012) who analysed external and internal factors related to women entrepreneurs. Akehurst et al. studied the external factors of business expansion and financing. Among the internal factors were demographic characteristics of age, marital status, motherhood (whether the woman has small children and how many), and the importance and influence of the family. Using a series of regressions, Akehurst et al. observed these independent variables to be related to motivation, barriers and success of women entrepreneurs. The present study built on the model proposed by Akehurst et al. by focusing on the principal barriers faced by women entrepreneurs (infrastructure/training and education barriers and gender barriers) (Akehurst et al. 2012). The aim of this study was twofold: first, to use different statistical techniques (PLS and QCA) to test the results obtained by Akehurst et al. (2012), and second, to observe the difference in results yielded by these two techniques. To achieve these objectives, the article has the following structure. The next section reviews the most recent theories on women entrepreneurship, and the education and training/infrastructure barriers and gender barriers faced by women. In the third section, the two methods (PLS and QCA) are compared theoretically to lay the foundation for practical comparison in the fourth section to observe differences between results. The final section presents the study’s conclusions.