Women Entrepreneurs in Western Romania: A Business Profile

Entrepreneurship and particularly women entrepreneurship are widely recognized as growth engine and mean for women empowerment, and investigating its driving forces and determinants is a subject of great interest for creating and implementing public policies focused on fostering women entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, compared to the contribution of women and their businesses to the creation of new jobs and economic growth, the research dedicated to women entrepreneurship is surprisingly poor and rather oriented to specific differences and gender discrimination than to fostering women entrepreneurship. Moreover, in the current economic context, the potential of the women entrepreneurship as an engine to overcome the economic crisis and to alleviate poverty is under-evaluated. There is, therefore, a need for a careful assessment of the women entrepreneurship potential as well as a careful identification of key policy framework conditions aimed at encouraging women entrepreneurship. Starting from the main lines of the literature, the paper investigates the business profile of women entrepreneurs in western Romania, as revealed by an empirical, mainly quantitative, research. The research was undertaken in the frame of a complex educational and research EU-funded project, namely AntrES project. AntrES (Romanian acronym for: The Entrepreneurship and the Equality of Chances. An inter-regional model of Women Entrepreneurial School) was a strategic project co-financed from European structural funds (around 3,000,000 euros), covering six counties in Western Romania, that created an inter-regional research, education and communication network (6 universities, 60 researchers, 1800 women entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs supported). The AntrES project has been selected from European Commission as success story. The present paper presents the research methodology and the data set generated, and the main findings concerning the business profile of women entrepreneurs in Western Romania. There are approached issues as: fields and sector preferred, age of the firm, ownership issues, occupational status and affiliation of business women, professional level and studies, entrepreneurial history and previous entrepreneurial experiences etc. The paper concludes suggesting gender-sensitive mix policy for encouraging women to exploit the possibilities offered by local and regional potential, based on the business profile of women entrepreneurs in Western Romania identified. Addressing to academics, practitioners and public authorities, the paper is a consistent study-case with considerable implications for further analysis and policies.