Women’s entrepreneurship and performance: Impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the perception of performance among women entrepreneurs
Type de matériel :
TexteLangue : français Détails de publication : 2024.
Sujet(s) : Ressources en ligne : Abrégé : This paper focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the perceived performance of women entrepreneurs in France. The exacerbation of inequalities between women and men linked to the health crisis also concerns female entrepreneurship. Firms created and managed by women have been more vulnerable to the crisis, with a significant number of entrepreneurial projects being abandoned. This seems to support the hypothesis often asserted in the literature that women entrepreneurs have a lower level of economic performance, measured in terms of growth in turnover, profit, or job creation. However, the very concept of performance can be questioned and does not enjoy consensus in academic communities. Integrating a social dimension and taking into account the specificities of the company (size, sector of activity, governance, type of ratios) leads to the consideration of a financial and non-financial vision of performance. It is also important to understand how women entrepreneurs themselves evaluate the performance of their company, and the criteria and indicators they favor. We integrate this comprehensive and reflective perspective of women entrepreneurs’ performance into our analysis. We seek to understand how women define performance and how these frames of reference have evolved with the COVID-19 crisis. The qualitative investigation is based on a group of twelve women entrepreneurs from the Grand Est region before and after the health crisis. The survey shows that the COVID-19 crisis reinforced the importance of non-financial performance criteria for women entrepreneurs, particularly that of support for local communities in which the entrepreneurial project is embedded. Practical implications follow from this observation, in particular with regard to the design of support mechanisms by public authorities and the development of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems to accompany the creation of women’s businesses and improve their resilience in the face of crises.
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This paper focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the perceived performance of women entrepreneurs in France. The exacerbation of inequalities between women and men linked to the health crisis also concerns female entrepreneurship. Firms created and managed by women have been more vulnerable to the crisis, with a significant number of entrepreneurial projects being abandoned. This seems to support the hypothesis often asserted in the literature that women entrepreneurs have a lower level of economic performance, measured in terms of growth in turnover, profit, or job creation. However, the very concept of performance can be questioned and does not enjoy consensus in academic communities. Integrating a social dimension and taking into account the specificities of the company (size, sector of activity, governance, type of ratios) leads to the consideration of a financial and non-financial vision of performance. It is also important to understand how women entrepreneurs themselves evaluate the performance of their company, and the criteria and indicators they favor. We integrate this comprehensive and reflective perspective of women entrepreneurs’ performance into our analysis. We seek to understand how women define performance and how these frames of reference have evolved with the COVID-19 crisis. The qualitative investigation is based on a group of twelve women entrepreneurs from the Grand Est region before and after the health crisis. The survey shows that the COVID-19 crisis reinforced the importance of non-financial performance criteria for women entrepreneurs, particularly that of support for local communities in which the entrepreneurial project is embedded. Practical implications follow from this observation, in particular with regard to the design of support mechanisms by public authorities and the development of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems to accompany the creation of women’s businesses and improve their resilience in the face of crises.




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