“Social entrepreneur and gender: what`s personality got to do with it?”

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is known as a promising path for creating social value in a sustainable and enduring way. Social entrepreneurs are at the core of the entrepreneurial process and are critical drivers for maintaining social entrepreneurial activity. Research on economic entrepreneurship identifies a gender gap favourable to men. In the social entrepreneurship arena, the existing evidence is slightly fuzzy, since this gender gap seems not to be so preeminent. The present study uses the Big Five Model to identify personality trait differences between women and men social entrepreneurs and to assess whether this differences influence the social entrepreneurial activity in a different way. A review of literature on gender differences and personality traits on social entrepreneurship details the main theoretical developments and builds the hypotheses. An email survey was applied to the heads of Portuguese social ventures to test the hypotheses previously formulated. The data gathered suggest that, both, female and male social entrepreneurs have a personality characterized by a high level of openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and emotional stability. Based on the analysis of variance (ANOVA) between the two groups and a logistic regression, our investigation has revealed that women and men who launch a new social venture only differ in one personality dimension - agreeableness - wherein women are highest scored. No significantly differences were found in the other personality traits.

Keywords: Social entrepreneurship; Gender, Big Five Personality traits; Portugal.

ÒSusana Bernardino

     Polytechnic Institute of Oporto/ISCAP/CECEJ, Porto, Portugal

ÒJ. Freitas Santos

     Polytechnic Institute of Oporto/ISCAP/CECEJ, Porto

ÒJ. Cadima Ribeiro

     University of Minho/NIPE, Braga, Portugal

(Reprodução de resumo de artigo publicado online em 7 de fevereiro de 2018 em International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJGE-07-2017-0040)