Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs, whatever their gender. Economy is a universal principle and starting up and running a business is a competence that is not given to everyone.
Those who have the courage and perseverance to start and run a business should be supported and admired whether they are male or female. If business leaders still choose to expand their business and recruit staff and treat and reward them properly, they should be cherished by society, whether they are men or women.
This is the theory; in practice things prove to be very different. Women all over the world still have to overcome obstacles that are almost absurd if they feel the entrepreneurial blood tickle. Studies have sufficiently demonstrated that women are just as good entrepreneurs as men and that by excluding them a lot of potential for job creation is lost. In many countries, policymakers have understood that women entrepreneurs not only create small businesses to support their families and escape the poverty trap, but because they have valuable ideas and view business and employment differently than men. In this article we discuss the facts and motives why female entrepreneurship is valuable to society.
We describe a number of typologies of female entrepreneurs, where we also place a high emphasis on the participation of women in the technological and digital professions. And we describe the initiatives that various countries and regions in Europe are taking to support and promote female entrepreneurship. The fact that this support and promotion takes place presently in many continents is based on the positive effects that female entrepreneurship can have on a family, municipality or region: they are reliable and productive, they are good with money, they are efficient distributors of goods and services within the household.
