Content area
Full Text
Introduction
It started with a conversation on the beach at the Entrepreneurship Division Social at the Annual Academy of Management Meetings, in August 1998. Nancy Carter, Elizabeth Gatewood, Patti Greene, Myra Hart and Candida Brush were talking about research on women’s entrepreneurship. A statistic was offered: more than 7 million women owners of businesses in the US, but they received only 2 per cent of the $33bn of institutional venture capital. Of the 1,200 firms that received venture capital in 1996, 30 were run by women (Pratt, 1998). This caught our attention, and we wondered, why women entrepreneurs were receiving such a small amount of venture capital, especially during these boom years?
In October 1998 we met for a retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we decided to write a grant proposal to study growth-oriented women entrepreneurs and their access to capital. While we did not know each other well, we were all committed to creating a collaborative research project to study women entrepreneurs. Each of us was at a different school and had a different area of expertise; Nancy (St. Thomas University) was a great statistician, trained in strategy and had worked on the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) research project. Betsy (Indiana University) formerly ran the University of Houston Small Business Development Center and had a degree in Psychology. Patti (University of Missouri- Kansas City) was a trained sociologist who had studied minority entrepreneurs. Myra (Harvard Business School) was a woman entrepreneur and case study researcher. Candida (Boston University) was also trained in strategy but had studied women’s entrepreneurship for more than 16 years, having conducted the first and largest academic US study.
We began by exploring research questions and methodologies and discussed why a research project focused on growth-oriented women entrepreneurs might be important. Statistics showed that in 1990, women-owned 32 per cent of all non-farm sole proprietorships (5,348,000), a number that grew to 37 per cent (6,833,000) in 1998 (Women in Business, 1998). Similarly, a Dun and Bradstreet sample of over 9 million firms estimated that 24.6 per cent of the 1.4 million women-owned business had revenues greater than 1 million in 1997, this number increasing to 25.5 per cent of 1.5 million in 2,000 (Center for...