Traditional approach in academic research in women entrepreneurship has been merely focused on internal factors in the start-up decision making process, business environmental barriers and difficulties for entrepreneurial women to balance work and family life. Several support pro grams have been designed worldwide to promote and support female entrepreneurship with pure empirical evidence on their efficiency and possible positive impact on start-up and survival rate of new businesses. On the other hand, the role of the informal sup port, mostly by family and spouses has been so far neglected in scholar research. The sample of 121 women start-ups was surveyed to investigate the role of family support with emphasis on spouses. Results confirmed that support of husbands is very important. Mostly, emotional support (belief and empowerment) is exposed; however, financial contribution seems to be highly appreciated: majority of female entrepreneurs' husbands had stabile income in the start-up period, being employed elsewhere rather than running their own businesses. More responsibilities which spouses were ready to take over regarding the home responsibilities (that is, childcare) should also not be neglected in the system of support to their entrepreneurial wives. Although, more important f or all, women with children appreciated spouses help and assistance to a higher extent.
Entrepreneurship has been a gender-defined phenomenon for several decades. It has been presented as a typically male domain which for its demanding performance requires typical male characteristics. In this paper, we follow the suggestions of researchers of female entrepreneurs and focus on the research of three groups of female entrepreneurs. We propose that female entrepreneurs in different life stages have distinguished forms of human and social capital, and we apply the factors of those capitals to be measured. We observe the influence of parents, maternity as a metaphor for family involvement and family responsibilities, friends, and the broader environment on social capital. We discussed female entrepreneurship using two functions - as emotional support and incentives and as an instrumental social capital that provides access to information, resources and business partners. We added previous entrepreneurial experience, the level of education attained, business knowledge acquired at school and specific training, industry experience, previous managerial experience to the human capital function. With our model, we introduced the theory of life expectancy of women into entrepreneurship theory, which brings us closer to understanding the external influences on entrepreneurial aspirations and motivations of women of different ages.
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