The complex causality of gender and entrepreneurship: to grow or not to grow?

Evan J. Douglas () and Vidhula Venugopal ()
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Evan J. Douglas: Queensland University of Technology
Vidhula Venugopal: SP Jain Institute for Management & Research

Small Business Economics, 2025, vol. 65, issue 2, No 22, 1209-1240

Abstract: Abstract This study takes a configurational approach to avoid the conflation of biological sex and psychosocial gender and to capture the interactions of causal conditions operating in interdependent conjunctivity to culminate in multiple pathways to both high and low growth aspirations for both men and women entrepreneurs. Whereas entrepreneurship has been seen as a masculine-gendered occupation, this study captures the impact of four gender types (Bem, 1981) and finds that entrepreneurship is predominantly an androgynous-gendered occupation whereby masculine (agentic) and feminine (communal) gender traits operate in conjunction to culminate in higher growth aspirations for practicing entrepreneurs of both sexes. Entrepreneurial growth typically requires agenticism, but communalism is also instrumental for growth. Our deductive model demonstrates that personal, family, and firm level conditions operate in interdependent conjunction to result in multiple pathways to both high and low growth aspirations within and across the gender types.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Growth aspirations; Gender types; Complex causality; FsQCA; Core and peripheral conditions; Synergistic; substitutive; and suppressive causal conditions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s11187-025-01047-w

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