Female entrepreneurship in France: Fighting against socio-cultural heritage

The process of new venture creation originates from entrepreneurial activity; the way in which women handle new venture creation echoes the femaleoriented motivations, activities and strategies that typify the new venture creation phase. While the area of female new venture creation has scarcely been studied, female entrepreneurship has been recognized as an important budding research area, albeit a largely untapped source of economic growth. Women entrepreneurs create new jobs, promote national and international economies, and provide society with inventive solutions that emerge from their entrepreneurial ventures and innovations. More importantly, women entrepreneurs introduce new and unique ways of tackling unexploited entrepreneurial opportunities and overcoming obstacles in the venture creation process, and implement their vision in a set of unique business practices. This distinctiveness, however, is somehow overlooked in research and practice; of the fields that have attracted entrepreneurship scholars over time, e.g., opportunity exploitation, sources of financing, venture capitalists’ practices and social networks, gender in the women entrepreneur’s quest has been, for the most part, treated as a component of “personal characteristics,�? similar to age and educational attainment. By offering a general look into the venture creation process, the male perspective dominates the area of entrepreneurship, leaving the female perspective essentially unexploited (Ahl, 2006; Moore, 1990; Stevenson, 1990).