“I could, but why should I?”: Entrepreneurial women's career pathways and how founding fits in (or doesn't)

Abstract

Why do highly qualified women with entrepreneurial self-efficacy choose not to pursue tech-venture founding? We adopt a career-perspective and interview 17 female Stanford engineering graduates—women who possess high entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), educational prestige, access to Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial networks, and who already overcame hurdles associated with entering and succeeding in a gender-incongruent setting. Despite these seemingly uniform conditions for tech entrepreneurship, we reveal four distinct career pathways: Skill Hunters, Life Masters, Strategists, and Idealists. While Skill Hunters remain attracted to entrepreneurship, the other groups are disillusioned with it, despite having experience as corporate entrepreneurs, business owners, and founders of not-for-profits. Our findings demonstrate how (in)congruency of women's career principles and context-based entrepreneurial outcome expectations shapes their entrepreneurial engagement.