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

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze families’ role in women entrepreneurial experience and to describe different possible involvement of birth or marriage family in women entrepreneurs’ activities. The reason for this study stems from the fact that micro- enterprises are key drivers of economic growth, and that women entrepreneurs are key developers of these businesses. So it’s important to know factors affecting their existence and their success or failure. Our aim is to describe some typical woman-family relationship profiles, characterized by families playing a central role in influencing female firms’ choices, behaviors and activities, in positive or negative ways. Design/methodology/approach – We address the research question adopting a qualitative research approach based on multiple 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 Italian women entrepreneurs, through a semi-structured questionnaire (Qu & Dumay, 2011), guided by a checklist. Originality/value – This analysis 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 analysis presented in this paper shows the existence of an unbreakable bound between female entrepreneurs and their families. 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.