the vanishing ambition gap
TRANSCRIPT
The vanishing ambition gap –contrasting UK early stage and
established women entrepreneurs
Stephen Roper and Karen Bonner
Introducing ERC
• Established Jan 2013 with a mission to deepen our understanding of ‘what drives SME productivity and growth’.
• Project value is £5.9m (FEC) over five years from consortium of 7 private and public funders (ESRC, BIS, Innovate UK, 4 major Banks via BBA (2013-15) and the British Business Bank (2015-18).
• Research is strongly policy/practice focussed. Impact and engagement agenda is paramount
• ERC is a UK Hub for SME Research with a strong team of world class researchers drawn from 6 University business schools (Warwick, Aston, Imperial, Birmingham, Queen’s Belfast and Strathclyde)
• ERC operates as a ‘virtual centre’ with researchers concentrated in Aston and Warwick and a ‘flying faculty’ model .
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Starting points
• Evidence suggests that entrepreneurs’ growth ambition is strongly linked to subsequent performance. So ambition matters…
• So lets take a look at growth ambition among early stage entrepreneurs and established entrepreneurs of each gender
• What we find is:
– (a) a high ambition gap by gender for early stage entrepreneurs;
– (b) no ambition gap by gender among established entrepreneurs?
• Why is this?
• And, along the way we will explore some international comparisons of early stage entrepreneurship..
Part 1: Early stage entrepreneurship – start-up and growth ambition
Looking at early stage entrepreneurs using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)
• In 2015, 9,405 adults aged 18-80 were sampled for GEM UK.
• Supported by BIS, Welsh Government, Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, Invest NI and Belfast City Council.
• GEM in the UK is led by Mark Hart (Aston) and Jonathan Levie(Strathclyde)
• GEM provides data on engagement in early stage entrepreneurship and ambitious entrepreneurship
Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) 2002-15 –all adults
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Total Early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) Rates – UK, US and Germany 2002-15 – females
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2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
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Early-Stage Entrepreneurship by gender 2015
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United Kingdom Germany United States
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Male TEA Female TEA
High Job Expectation TEA – UK Home Nations (pooled 2013-15) – males and
females
But its not quite as simple as that ….
• Early stage entrepreneurs differ in other ways apart from gender of course
• So we need to allow for these differences in age, the type of business etc.
• Even when we allow for these differences, however, early stage women entrepreneurs in the UK are 5.9 per cent less likely to have high growth aspirations
• Why is this? Some other studies have suggested that this ‘gender’ effect may reflect other factors such as finance …
Probit model for high growth ambition among early stage entrepreneurs
Age under 30 (+)White -
Degree (-)Household Inc (+)Family business (-)
Female owned -
Part 2: Employer businesses and growth ambition
For employer businesses….
• Focus now on women-led, women-owned businesses in comparison to male-led and male-owned businesses
• Intermediate groups (e.g. women owned but male-led) businesses are dropped
• Also focus here only on employer businesses, i.e. those that have one or more employees
• Data comes from the new Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2015 (around 1270 women-owned/led businesses and 6,400 male-owned/led)
Some basic comparisons
And do they aim to growth the business? By how much?
Modelling growth ambition among existing businesses
• So far have considered bivariate relationships only and can be misleading sometimes
• So we can run multivariate models controlling for size, sector etc. all at once
• When we do this we find no significant difference between the probability that women-owned and male-owned businesses are seeking to grow
• And we get the same result when we use GEM data for established business owners (confirmation)
Probit model for the probability of seeking to grow
(N=7703)
Employment +Business age -Innovator +Exporter +
Female led (+)
Concluding ….
• So two key results:
• 1. Early stage female entrepreneurs are 5.8 per cent less likely to aspire to high growth than their male peers
• 2. Female business owners/leaders have the same growth aspirations as their male peers.
• Why is this?
Contact us:
• If you would like any more information about the ERC and any of its activities please contact us: Stephen Roper ([email protected]), Mark Hart ([email protected]) or Vicki Belt ([email protected]).
More details about the activities of the ERC and our latest events can be found at:
www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk