Women entrepreneurs' business goals and performance: in harmony?

Research on performance and business success has captured attention of many researchers in the female entrepreneurship field. Nevertheless, there is still enough controversy on how to measure performance and which indicators should be taken into account, mainly when there are comparative studies between men and women entrepreneurs. In fact, controversy has arisen regarding if companies created by women have a higher rate of failure or lower performance in comparison with those created by men (Brush, 1992; Fischer et al.,1993; Kalleberg & Leicht, 1991; Srinivasan et al., 1994). Performance studies have used different variables to measure it, in a great majority, they have only been focused on measuring economic performance (Sexton & Robinson, 1989; Watson, 2002; Watson & Robinson, 2003) without considering other type of measurements, that can be important for women entrepreneurs, apart from the economic ones. Studies that have delved into this topic, analyzed others aspects than economic results of performance and argued that male and female entrepreneurs pursue different business goals. Entrepreneurial women generally emphasize social goals, while male entrepreneurs emphasize economic goals (Brush, 1992; Holmquist & Sundin, 1989; Lamolla, 2005). In this paper we analyse only on women entrepreneurs and examinate differences between their business goals and business performance. A sample of 231 new ventures created by women entrepreneurs located in the six more populated cities of Spain was collected. Using mail survey as instrument we obtained a response rate of 21.97%. We used non-parametric tests to investigate differences between "economic-oriented" and "non-economic oriented" business goals. Additionally, regressions were used to assess the impact of business goals on performance. Our research shows that women entrepreneurs that follow non-economic goals either individual or social-oriented do not necessarily deteriorate the economic performance of an enterprise. Contrarily to some previous literature, our results seem to support the idea that women who prefer individual or social goals are indeed able to succeed in their enterprises because of these non-economic goals. Moreover, we also find that economic-oriented women tend to experience a cost in economic performance when pursuing non-economic goals. Results bring out that entrepreneurial activity for women implies to get an economic benefit at same time that they do manage well with others non-economic benefits.