Women entrepreneurship : an exploratory study

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to gain a better insight of Lebanese female entrepreneurs perceptions regarding the main challenges and constraints they face in launching their new ventures in the Lebanese market. The paper integrates different sociocultural, economical, and legal aspects to highlight opportunities and constraints as a part of the Lebanese context. The paper adopts a qualitative approach, capitalizing on semistructured interviews with twelve women entrepreneurs to explore their perceptions and interpretations of factors affecting women entrepreneurial activities in the Lebanese context. The findings clearly illustrate the relevance of micro and macro levels factors specifically in identifying the success of women entrepreneurship and the need to integrate other units of analysis to better understand the complexity of entrepreneurial activity in any particular context.