Am I Successful? An Answer of Women Entrepreneurs

The success of women entrepreneurs is almost uniformly judged by financial criteria. As a result, the so-called underperformance hypothesis is put forward. However, this hypothesis may be ill-founded, and it may serve to reproduce and reinforce myths about women and entrepreneurship. It is important to understand what success means for women entrepreneurs operating in a given socio-economic context before we label them as underperformers. Moreover, although the importance of the contextual approach is recognized, some contexts are under-researched and less visible. Results from North America and Western Europe cannot be replicated in other contexts, especially in developing countries or patriarchal societies. For different contexts, we need new evidence. And this new evidence can make us realize that some concepts need to be revised to capture the collective vision of entrepreneurs. Instead of one paradigm, we should recognize the existence of a diversity of forms, motives, and understanding of success in entrepreneurship, as well as the contexts in which it occurs, to ensure holistic knowledge on entrepreneurship. To respond to these challenges, the research is conducted on a sample of 300 female entrepreneurs in the Republic of Serbia who operate in manufacturing. The respondents were asked to state what business success means to them and then to subjectively assess how successful they are according to the same criteria. In this way, the research results reveal how successful women entrepreneurs are, but measured in a way that reflects their perceptions of success. Results show that the importance that a certain criterion has for female entrepreneurs as an indicator of success is positively related to their success measured by that criterion. Not imposing on women entrepreneurs the usual measures of business success, the paper responds to calls to de-masculinize women’s entrepreneurship research by introducing gender-specific variables and widening the set of measures of success. In doing so, it is placed in specific and under-researched contexts of a developing country and manufacturing industry. In this way, the paper further contributes to the enrichment of the entrepreneurship knowledge base.