Does a Y Really Make a Difference?

In case of different preconditions a gender gap is well explored in entrepreneurship literature. Hisrich and Brush (1987), Brush (1992), Fischer et al. (1993) e.g. show that women that start businesses tend to have less technical education and less experience than men. Additionally, they have less start-up capital and use more conservative start-up strategies (Verheul and Thurik (2001), Cassar (2004)). Another example for a gender gap in entrepreneurship is shown by Aldrich (1989), Brush (1999), Kalleberg and Leicht (1991) that found women work less (hours), have smaller networks and have more family-role demands than men. Regarding different preconditions for women in comparison to men the assumption of a self-selection effect seams reasonable. Only the best women can overcome unequal preconditions. But, are women less able to create and manage firms than men?

As Brush (1992), Brush (1999), Cassar (2004), Kalleberg and Leicht (1991) and Gatewood et al. (2003) we believe that women are very similar to men because the business processes are the same for both, men and women.

Our paper tries to answer two questions. First, we want to show with current data that women are similar to men in handling and managing firms excluding the self-selection effect as good as possible. To achieve this goal we use data from business succession. We use a primary dataset from German speaking Europe with 4384 firms collected by the University of St. Gallen, University of Economics Fribourg, University of Liechtenstein, University of Siegen and the Johannes-Kepler-University Linz. We compare how men and women are able to take-over businesses. In this case the preconditions, on average, are more the same for men and women and we have no or even a smaller self-selection effect. Second, we show gender differences and similarities for business succession in general.

Thus, this paper analyzes the impact of successor’s gender on family internal or external success. Based on entrepreneurship-research our contribution presents new empirical findings regarding objective and subjective factors of success. Therefore, we meet the demands of a more sophisticated research for gender effects in family business. Our hypotheses regard the research of management approaches, start-ups and moderating influential variables on company´s success. To test our hypotheses we use our international primary data collection of 2008/2009 and execute OLS regressions. We find that the predecessors concerns female successors could be minor effective is not justified. In contrary, women are similarly effective like their male colleagues regarding objective and subjective factors of success.