Le imprese femminili in Italia: i risultati di un’indagine esplorativa

Entrepreneurship has usually been considered a male-dominated activity. In 2012, however, 224m out of 400m entrepreneurs worldwide were women (GEM 2012). Female entrepreneurship therefore clearly represents an important component of the business sector at global level. To date, however, the scope of research on such a relevant topic is still confined to the US and Anglo-Saxon countries. Also, academic research on Italian female entrepreneurship is very limited, despite Italy has the highest number of female-owned firms in Europe (Eurostat, 2013). This paper thus contributes to fill this research gap by investigating the characteristics, the main problems and motivations of 310 Italian female-owned firms