This study of female entrepreneurship traditionally has been inspired by gender equality issues. Female entrepreneurs were assumed to experience gender-related discrimination and to experience more difficulties when starting up and running a business than their male counterparts. Today research and policy have been more and more fuelled by the idea that female entrepreneurs are important for economic progress. Even when issues such as barriers and obstacles to female entrepreneurs are raised in the gender and entrepreneurship debate, this is usually done from the perspective that female entrepreneurs are an untapped resource and have potential to contribute to a country’s economic performance. Indeed, although gender equality is one of the arguments underlying the support for female entrepreneurs within the European Union, the argument that female entrepreneurs (have the potential to)contribute to economic performance continues to play a role here. The global growth of female entrepreneurship in the last decades has been accompanied by an increase in the number of studies on female entrepreneurship. Unlike most existing studies, which focus primarily upon female entrepreneurship in Western European countries, the present thesis investigates gender differences in entrepreneurship in the Eastern European countries. Different aspects of entrepreneurship are studied including the individual, the organization and the environment. A systematic distinction is made between direct and indirect gender effects on entrepreneurship to be able to disentangle ‘pure’ gender effects from effects of factors that are correlated with gender.

Keywords :Managing diversity, female entrepreneurship, economic performance, gender differences, entrepreneurial diversity