Determinants of women opportunity-driven entrepreneurship and business diversification in diverse contexts

This research is focused on women entrepreneurship across various geographies with distinct economic, institutional, and cultural contexts, including Portugal, a developed European country, and a group of emerging African nations characterized by turbulent political and sociocultural environments. For both men and women, the opportunity to start a business and the necessity of supporting oneself and one’s family are significant motivations for engaging in entrepreneurship, and their motivations are influenced by personal and family characteristics that can enhance the business’s viability and survival. However, women face specific challenges that can be analyzed through the lens of social role theory, which provides a framework for understanding how gender affects entrepreneurship. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis was employed to analyze individual-level entrepreneurial data and to identify how different combinations of conditions lead to entrepreneurial decisions and business expansion through market and activity diversification.