Female entrepreneurship:

meanings, motivations, and challenges to women who decide to become entrepreneurs

Abstract

Female entrepreneurship is an alternative to emancipation and the country’s gender inequality. Considering this growth, studies in the business scientific field about the female entrepreneurs are more relevant each day. Thus, this article has the objective of characterizing the meaning and profile behind female entrepreneurs in Distrito Federal, Brazil, along with their motivations and challenges to create and maintain a business, and also the impacts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is descriptive and exploratory, being divided into three steps. This study gathers information from a project entitled “Female Entrepreneurship”, which performed in-depth interviews using a semi-structured script, in distinct moments. In the study’s findings, family issues, financial difficulties, the search for self-realization, and opportunity perspectives have stood out as boosters of the creation of new businesses. During their journeys, the interviewed entrepreneurs reported the challenge of separating personal from professional lives, the need to face sexism and prejudice along their daily routines, and the overload of accumulating functions at the job and at home. With the pandemic, the importance of recreating the business has significantly increased, before issues that appeared without proper planning, such as financial difficulties and the loss of clients, turning the support of others necessary to maintain the business running.