Growth is often assumed to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. In humans it might be, in firms not so much. Indeed, growth within the field of study of entrepreneurship (as an outcome, orientation and/or opportunity) has attracted a great deal of attention for its very propensity not to occur. This is especially true of growth in terms of certain groups of entrepreneurs, and in particular women. At the risk of oversimplifying a great body of work (but for the sake of brevity!), it has largely concluded that (for a variety of reasons) those firms owned by women are less likely to grow than those owned by men. In positive terms this is sometimes described as the fact that firms owned by women are more likely to demonstrate the characteristics of lifestyle entrepreneurship – or other capped growth patterns. However, in the negative sense non‐growth has, for example, often been put down to reasons such as the inability of women to secure adequate financial resources to enable growth. No matter what the reason, the fact that female‐owned firms are not growing (or at least not in the same way or at the same rate) than male‐owned firms, has stimulated a great deal of interest – from researchers, policy‐makers, and no doubt the female entrepreneurs themselves.
The Diana Project (launched in 1999) is one academically‐oriented demonstration of this interest in firm growth and female entrepreneurs. A collaboration between academics with a shared research agenda, (the challenges of growth for women entrepreneurs), this book is a significant output of that collective effort. In 2003 (with the Swedish Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute) the project hosted its second international conference. The book is based on papers presented at that gathering by scholars from around the globe – a testament to both the scope of the project and the quality of this subsequent written output. As is stated by the editors on page seven of the first chapter, the book “represents the hard work and dedication of an expanded community of scholars passionate about understanding growth of women's entrepreneurship”.
The book comprises 16 chapters and is divided by an introductory chapter and then two parts: part one which consists of reports on female entrepreneurship from seven countries, and part two which includes eight chapters on a variety of research topics. Chapter one provides a useful overview of the book, and indeed of the Diana Project itself. Each of the chapters that follow is introduced, and an overarching theoretical framework for the work as a whole is introduced.
The chapters in part one report on the female entrepreneurship “situation” in a diverse range of geographic contexts: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and the USA. The chapters follow a similar structure. Each opens with what might be described as a statistical snapshot of the participation of women in entrepreneurship, self‐employment or small firm ownership in that particular country. Which terminology is used depends on the data used in the chapter and the way in which participation has been conceptualised (e.g. whether small firm ownership has been used as a proxy for entrepreneurship). Some chapters draw on data sets specific to their country, while others utilise data from broader data sets such as that of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) – or in some instances both sorts of data are used. Each chapter does attend to definitional issues and therefore it is clear what data are being talked about in each (as well as the way in which small firms are defined in each of the various countries), and that therefore the data sets cannot typically usefully be used for inter‐country comparison. The data used in each chapter are typically displayed using very clear, and useful, tables and/or graphs. Frequently data have also been gathered that presents a historical dimension to the participation figures.
After opening in the fashion described, each chapter in part one of the book goes on to examine the demand (e.g. financial capital, social capital, human capital, personal goals, strategic choices, etc.) and supply (e.g. sources of finance) side issues facing the female entrepreneurs in each country. Each chapter then concludes with what could be described as recommendations, or future‐oriented, paragraphs (e.g. under headings such as priorities or prognosis). It is elements such as these in the book that contribute to its overall usefulness quotient, and will help ensure its appeal to practitioners and policymakers, as well as researchers and post graduate students interested in the field.
A pervasive theme of both parts of the book is finance – and its relationship to female entrepreneurs and the growth of their firms. Indeed, over half of the eight chapters in part two that focus on specific research topics highlight one dimension or another of the financial issues that women face. For example, chapter nine (by Watson, Newby and Mahuka) examines in detail the relationship between external funding the growth of small firms in the Australian context. It concludes that there is a small, if not non‐existent, finance gap for the Australian small firm sector, but emphasises the importance of the attitude of the firm's owner or manager in relation to the seeking of external finance. In the research described, women were found to be less inclined to risk, and therefore consequently to the prospect of securing external funding to facilitate firm growth. However, the authors go on to draw out the fact that this perceived lessening of risk is in fact in regard to the firm, and not necessarily to the owner‐manager themselves. The drawing out of this sort of subtlety from research findings is typical of many of the contributions of the authors in the second part of the book.
Other chapters that deal with financial issues in the second part of the book include those covering topics such as the supply of finance for female entrepreneurs in Ireland and Northern Ireland; the supply of private capital (venture capital, private equity and angel finance) for women entrepreneurs in the New Zealand context; the relationship between banks and female entrepreneurs in the UK; and the gender gap for Spanish female entrepreneurs in relation to resources and subsequent firm performance.
An example of a chapter in the second part of the book that does not deal explicitly with the financial perspective is chapter ten (by Manolova). The author of this chapter carried out case studies in the Bulgarian construction industry (a sector in which <5 per cent of firms are reportedly owned by women). Taking a resource‐based view, and within a “transition” economy context, the author used theoretical sampling to focus on three matched pairs of firms. She concludes that in terms of human capital the women were well, if not better, educated than their male counterparts; social capital was under‐utilised by the female participants; and in terms of financial capital men and women fared the same.
All the chapters that comprise the book are underpinned by recent and relevant research – this is a strength of the work as a whole and contribute to its status as an extremely useful contribution. Each individual chapter is also well‐referenced and well crafted – testament to the efforts of both contributors and editors. This is unsurprising, however, given the calibre of the authors and indeed the editors themselves (most holding professorial positions in the discipline of entrepreneurship specifically).
The breadth of this book is not just geographic. Its contents are also methodologically diverse and contribute to the notion that knowledge in this field will be furthered by the investigation of the subjective as well as the objective, and by the application of the qualitative as well as quantitative method. Overall the book is a testament to the integral role of women in the economic progress entrepreneurial activity can bring about. Whilst it did not explicitly seek to justify the importance of the role of women, the book achieved this by its implicit demonstration of the impact women have in the economies and firms of which they are a part.
As well as answering a great number of the questions relevant to the topic of female entrepreneurs and firm growth, the book contributes to the ongoing dialogue that will create new knowledge by indicating where and how efforts can be made to address what questions remain to be answered. Therefore, at the end of this substantial work the reader is left with a sense of potential: the potential for the book to make a significant contribution to greater understanding of the topic under examination; the potential contribution of the future generations of women who will become entrepreneurs in times when so much more will be understood about how and why they do what they do; and the potential of the Diana collaboration to contribute so much more of that knowledge in the future.
