Abstract
Gender inequality and empowerment of all women and girls is not a stand-alone sustainable development goal but rather an integral of the other goals of decent work and economic growth, poverty elimination and sustainable cities and communities. Women entrepreneurs play an important role in their economies. Our study fills a gap in the literature on women entrepreneurship in some ways. It focuses specifically on the early steps of business ventures for men and women who have potential and intention to start up their own businesses in the very near future. We explore the influence of factors related to personal characteristics, family relevance and social connections on their entrepreneurial decisions. We used a rich set of individual-level data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2013 for six Southeast Asian countries which are at different stages of their economic development. This has allowed us to compare and draw implications on the relevance of the stage on business intentions across groups of men and women. At the country level, in our analysis of 2011–2015 data also from GEM, we found a potential negative correlation between the Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) rates and urbanization levels in six ASEAN countries. The analysis at the individual level confirmed that women in ASEAN economies generally have a 4% higher probability than men of realizing their intentions in establishing business start-ups, other factors being equal. This result varies from country to country. The largest effect was in Indonesia (8%), followed by Thailand and Malaysia (3.8%) but there was no such difference in Singapore, the Philippines or Vietnam. Moreover, business skills are more important than general education in determining business start-ups. A business-oriented social network, especially knowing successful entrepreneurs, perceptions of entrepreneurship and attitudes also play critical roles in raising the probability for both men and women to create their business ventures by 10–20%.
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Notes
- 1.
The definitions of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) vary among ASEAN member states. Within a country, Thailand for example, the thresholds on number of employees and assets are also different across sectors and industries such as manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and services.
- 2.
Detailed interpretations of each stage of development is presented in Sect. 3.
- 3.
Estimation interpretation of the regression coefficients from the logistic model is somewhat tricky since the estimated coefficients do not directly reflect the effects of predictor variables on the probability of success (which means being an intentional entrepreneur in our case). It rather shows the effects on the log of the probability of success over the probability of failure which is called the log odds ratio). Therefore, the estimation of marginal effects is necessary to present more readable effects of the predictor variables on the probability.
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Tam, B.T.M., Leetrakun, P. (2020). Starting Up a Business in ASEAN: A Gender Perspective. In: Joshi, D., Brassard, C. (eds) Urban Spaces and Gender in Asia. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36494-6_5
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