GENDER AND ECONOMIC COMPETENCES

Abstract

The knowledge and skills of the company's founders are usually the deciding factors in a SME's ability to thrive and expand. However, the impact of entrepreneurs' personalities on their enterprises has been the subject of few research. This research uses upper echelons theory and logistic regression to examine the connection between business owners' demographic characteristics (age, gender, education, and experience) and the probability of different forms of personal bankruptcy. Our findings indicate that businesses managed by senior citizens have a reduced chance of failure because of insufficient equity, whereas businesses led by women have a lower risk of failure because of a lack of economic competence. Startups headed by industry experts tend to underestimate their capital needs and fail owing to a lack of equity, but enterprises managed by women have a greater failure rate due to financial constraints. By illustrating how much less probable bankruptcy is due to a lack of business economic expertise and significant cost pressure, it highlights the necessity for seasoned management in particular. Our results may allow for the advancement of entrepreneurship education since we did not uncover a statistically significant relationship between an entrepreneur's degree of education and the reasons of failure we analyzed. There would be a greater emphasis on the importance of these attributes and the training of management skills in entrepreneurship programs if we knew which ones were most strongly associated with business failure.