Encouraging female entrepreneurship in Jordan: environmental factors, obstacles and challenges

The number of female entrepreneurs and their contribution to the economy is steadily rising. Yet research suggests that female entrepreneurs face more challenges and barriers than their male counterparts. This is expected to be even more prevalent in Islamic contexts, which are characterised by conservative and patriarchal societies. In this research, 254 female business students from a private and a public university responded to a questionnaire that gauges their perceptions about potential barriers to entrepreneurship in Jordan and whether the business education they are receiving helps to prepare them for future entrepreneurial activity. Our results help to form a basis on which a deeper understanding of the phenomena can be achieved through more in depth future research. Among the main environmental factors that worry potential female entrepreneurs are the weakness of Jordanian economy, lack of finance, fear of risk, gender inequality and inability to maintain a work and private life balance. Our results also show that students are really not aware of the opportunities available to them and are unable to make a proper assessment. We call on both universities and the Jordanian government to put more emphasis on practical entrepreneurial education and encouraging women to play a much more active role within the workforce

A plea for varieties of entrepreneurship

Research into the link between national institutions and entrepreneurship is characterized by three shortcomings: First, clear-cut concepts of institutions are rare. Second, a parsimonious understanding of how a few core institutions influence entrepreneurship is missing. Third, scholars often ignore that incrementally innovative ventures constitute a distinct (and under-researched) type of entrepreneurship next to the (over-researched) form of radically innovative, high-growth or high-tech entrepreneurship. By addressing these three shortcomings, the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VoC) literature can explain how a core group of distinct national institutions facilitate the development of different types of entrepreneurship between countries. In particular, the VoC framework illustrates the comparative institutional advantage that continental European economies offer to incrementally innovative ventures. Applications of the VoC reasoning to entrepreneurship studies would thus allow researchers to, first, perform focused rather than eclectic analyses of institutional influences on entrepreneurship. Second, it would pave the way for research into institutionally induced equifinality. Third, entrepreneurship research could move away from its wishful ideology displaying radically innovative entrepreneurship as the most desirable form of entrepreneurship. As a consequence, policymakers could target entrepreneurial support measures more specifically to their economy’s institutional environment