An unbreakable bond between work and family: the experience of Italian women entrepreneurs

Purpose – One of the main characteristics of the female entrepreneurial experiences and one of the main differences between women entrepreneurs and their male counterparts, is the role that the family plays. Very often family relationships are key factors in explaining why women decide to become entrepreneurs, how their entrepreneurial experiences are made possible and in understanding their opportunities of success and development. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the family support the female entrepreneurship. this work aims to describe different possible ways in which family – both the origin and the “new” family – can be involved in women entrepreneurial experiences. The motivation for the study stems from the fact that micro-enterprises are key drivers of economic growth, and that woman entrepreneurs are key developers of these businesses. For this reason that it is important to focus on the role of the family with regard to female entrepreneurship, with the aim of identifying and describing the plurality of the reality of the situation as affirmed by David (2006) “on the theme of female professional experiences, the family environment is often recurrent and is under different declinations”. The objective of this paper is therefore to analyse the role of the birth or marriage family in the professional experiences of women and to look into how the family intervenes and influences women’s choices in both positive and negative ways Design/methodology/approach – In this paper we try to describe some family profiles, identifying the most common situations involving women entrepreneurs. The research question is to understand different types of family involvement in women’s entrepreneurial experience. From a methodological point of view, we address the research question adopting a qualitative research approach based on case studies (Yin, 2009).Case studies are particularly suited to look at the meaning of the experiences of people, as it is a research strategy particularly suitable to examine in depth current events of real life. Data collection is based on direct interviews (McKenzie, 2007) with women entrepreneurs, through a semi-structured questionnaire (Qu&Dumay, 2011), guided by a checklist. The questionnaire has been tailored depending on the characteristics of the person interviewed. The interviewer's attention is focused on both verbal and non-verbal communication, trying to point out how much importance the family has had in the business. Originality/value – this analysis should help to better focus one of the key issue of women’s life when they try to balance family life with their work and their professional aspirations. This means that in order to support women entrepreneurship is essential to address this issue. Finally, it’s important to know and understand the role of family in women entrepreneurial experiences in order to clearly interpret the reasons of women-owned businesses success or failure, as family ties will inevitably have an impact on their performances. Practical implications – The implications of these observations about the unbreakable bound existing between female entrepreneurs and their families are particularly highlighted. Under a methodological profile, the main conclusion of our analysis is that female entrepreneurial experiences – women’s choice to become an entrepreneur and characteristics of their businesses – cannot be truly understood if attention is not paid also on family dimension. This latter aspect underlines a very profound difference between the entrepreneurial experiences of men and women, as it’s very difficult to find similar situations when men entrepreneurs are analyzed.