The Gender Issue in Entrepreneurship Activity: the Current Perception of Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Today, the issue of gender and equal opportunities for women and men is raised more and more often. That is despite the fact that in developed countries there are very massive feminization trends. Нowever, the development of new technologies, the transition to online life brings gender issues to the fore in the context of new geoeconomic challenges, such as the development of creative industries, digitalization, rising unemployment, growing social and economic inequality. Looking to the future is impossible without understanding the impact of the past. This paper examines three countries, principle economic partners of Ukraine, which had a socialist past, although formed in different socio-cultural vectors, and those that show different rates of development and use different economic models. The working hypothesisis as follows: whether gender entrepreneurship differs in these countries. The database is taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring (GEM) and investigated using statistical and econometric methods. The results showed that with the maximum similarity of perceptions of entrepreneurs in analyzed countries, the gender difference still exists in the direction of greater entrepreneurial activity of women in the country, which shows higher economic performance today. It should be noted that the main problem and limitation of this study is the source of data, which is based on monitoring, which does not cover all countries of the world, so in particular it does not contain data on Ukraine. In addition, from the point of view of the input data collected by GEM, we have almost equal proportions of surveyed men and women, both in general and those engaged in entrepreneurial activities. But this is not fully representative. Because demographic composition in these countries differs. It is also worth noting that the GEM data is a survey conducted by a trusted institution in the country, which is not fully representative for cross-country comparison.