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Aim: Female entrepreneurship is a still-untapped economic potential. To trigger it, it is necessary to better recognize barriers to its development. Thus, the aim of the research was to identify the motives that make women start their own businesses, the reasons why they postpone or decline such decisions, the barriers that they encounter when running a business, and their priorities concerning professional careers and family. Methods: Applied methods include an e-mail survey and direct interviews, both using a questionnaire. The gathered data was processed using standard qualitative data analysis tools and descriptive analysis. Results: Women decide on their own business mainly because of negative experiences of being an employee and, to a lesser degree, because of a lack of satisfactory job offers or a lack of job offers at all. However, they often postpone starting their own business because of subjective reasons: the feeling that they lack experience, the lack of self-confidence, the fear of failure, and objective ones: lack of capital. The identified barriers in women running businesses are mainly universal, not gender-related, i.e., high taxes, problems with finding
employees, and frequent changes in legal and administrative regulations. Limited time devoted to family is the only gender-related barrier. However, a considerable share of respondents claims that there are no bottle-necks to female entrepreneurship in Poland. Conclusions: To trigger the potential of female entrepreneurship, we recommend two types of actions: training, mentoring and promoting success stories aimed at decreasing the subjective barriers to women starting businesses and actions aimed at diminishing the universal, not gender-related obstacles in running businesses in Poland.
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