The Scarcity of Female Entrepreneurship

The main part of our paper presents an analysis of women’s participation in the entrepreneurial process in the earliest stage – we were interested in gender differences with regard to the ability to create or start a new business. Our research is based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project. The results of this analysis revealed that there are evident differences between male and female entrepreneurs in the earliest stage of the entrepreneurship process, as well as among the 37 countries included in the GEM. There are a number of factors suggesting that dissimilar processes lead to opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship, which holds for men and women, and that processes that affect female entrepreneurship are different from those affecting male entrepreneurship. Specific attention in this paper is given, primarily, to Slovenia as well as to Croatia.