Globally, men are twice as likely as women to start a business. Most research into how to start a business has been focused on men. Not much has looked at why women are not fully represented among entrepreneurs or how to change this.

Yet it’s known that women entrepreneurs play an important role as leaders of entrepreneurial teams who contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction.

Research shows that women in South Africa are less likely to consider starting a business than men. They are also significantly less likely to act on their entrepreneurial intentions. One reason could be the lack of entrepreneurial competencies and the extent to which women have “prior exposure to business”.

My research set out to investigate the relationship between prior entrepreneurial exposure and entrepreneurial action. In other words, whether women who came from a business environment where they were exposed to prior entrepreneurial experience were more likely to start their own business. This included “shadowing” an entrepreneur, having entrepreneurial parents, working in an entrepreneurial business before starting your own or having entrepreneurial role models.

My approach towards the question was a new one. I divided entrepreneurial action into three phases of a process – before a decision is taken, before action, and action itself.

As I expected, context is key. This is also true for women and their entrepreneurial endeavours.

Being exposed to role models or having entrepreneurial parents encouraged women to start businesses. This prior exposure had a stronger effect on action when women have certain entrepreneurial competencies. The relevant ones were: self-efficacy, leadership, curiosity, innovativeness, and need for achievement (motivation).

My findings have important implications for women entrepreneurs, educators and entrepreneurship models, which have been traditionally male dominated. For example, to get more women to start businesses educators and policy makers can develop women’s self-efficacy, leadership, curiosity, innovativeness and motivation entrepreneurial competencies based on their…