Not Just Domestic Engineers : An Exploratory Study of Homemaker Entrepreneurs

The entrepreneurial activities of homemakers are studied in order to fill a gap in the entrepreneurship literature regarding homemakers that intend to found businesses and become entrepreneurs. Most of these nascent entrepreneurs are difficult to identify because most home-based businesses are part-time ventures that are low profile and are overlooked by researchers. Using information from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), the differences between 116 full-time homemakers who intend to start a business and a comparison group of 700 non-homemakers (men and women) who intend to start a business are compared using two variables: resources of potential new ventures and the nascent entrepreneurs' expectations regarding their firms. A secondary goal was to evaluate the power of the PSED in examining unique types of nascent entrepreneurs that have not been researched or that have been under-researched in the past. Overall findings indicate that there are significant differences and similarities between homemaker and non-homemaker nascent entrepreneurs, as well as those homemakers without entrepreneurial intentions. The PSED dataset allowed the researchers to examine a number of variables on many different types of nascent entrepreneurs that otherwise could not have been studied, although the fact that the PSED depends on self-reporting by homemakers is a weakness. (JSD)