Gender, Strategy and Performance in Small Businesses
A study on the impact of gender on strategy and performance
Why did we choose to study small businesses?
There already was a lot of litterature focusing on large companies and we thought that focusing on small businesses would allow us to study how women perform in the entreneurship world and lead our own analysis without being too influenced by the articles we read since the studies concerning the link between performance and gender within small firms are more rare and the results diverge from the results obtained on large firms. Small businesses are also more accessible and their strategy isn't as complicated as the strategy set up by huge multinational firms.
How did we compare the strategy of men and women entrepreneurs?
In order to answer our research question, we have built a sample of 27 entrepreneurs, 10 women and 17 men. For that, entrepreneurs have been selected from different public and private incubators in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux and Caen, in order to reduce as much as possible the selection bias. They were chosen from the cybercommerce and new technologies sectors and their businesses were created in 2014.
Then we have built two questionnaires (one for products and one for services) to compare the strategy and the performance of the entrepreneurs and see if we could find a correlation between gender and strategy. To built our questionnaire we used Michael Porter's generic strategies.
Here is the link of the questionnaire on products: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9Ua4DNROfrte_VXHb2guGmafL6myXklZ_UCvCQMQGeHA5HQ/viewform
Here is the questionnaire on services: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1o1lLABS-waUSzft5VqC8kEarSqjCnaFTGtPclgDGmNM/viewform?edit_requested=true
About our qualitative study...
In parallel to the quantitative research, we decided to conduct individual interviews in order to sharpen the results of the quantitative research and to question what we have found in the literature review. Many of them were consultants and had a consequent experience in analysing the strategy of small businesses. These entrepreneurs came from Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
We had no precise questionnaire for the interviews that we have made (we did had a list of themes we wanted to talk about though). We asked the entrepreneurs specific questions about their business and about themselves: their background, the reasons which pushed them to their start their own business, what did this business do...We also asked them their personal opinion on our general subject (gender, strategy and performance).