Gender and Business Ethics of Enterprise Students and Nascent Entrepreneurs Engaged in Entrepreneurship Education

Fernando Lourenço, Natalie Sappleton and Ranis Cheng

Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies, 2015, vol. 24, issue 2, 186-203

Abstract: It has generally been argued that women have higher moral standards or display greater concern about the effects of their actions on others when responding to ethical dilemmas. However, the findings of empiricists have hardly been conclusive. We contend that it is important to investigate the ethical attitudes towards business practice of those who are at the early phase of the entrepreneurship path such as enterprise students ( n = 128) and nascent entrepreneurs ( n = 204). The findings revealed sex differences in the ethical attitudes of enterprise students, but not of nascent entrepreneurs. In addition, the business ethics of male nascent entrepreneurs were significantly higher than those of male enterprise students. We argue that sex-role socialisation reduces differences among individuals performing similar activities, and use moral development theory to explain that ethical values evolve over time.

Keywords: Gender; ethics; entrepreneurship education; business enterprise students; nascent entrepreneurs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0971355715586891 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jouent:v:24:y:2015:i:2:p:186-203

DOI: 10.1177/0971355715586891

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies from Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().