Gender Performance Gap: The Causal Effect of the “No Choice” Option on the ‘Underperformance’ of Women-owned Businesses in Patriarchal Societies

The female ‘underperformance’ discourse is a well-established and often disputed notion in entrepreneurship research. Women-owned businesses are often juxtaposed against their male counterparts as a measure of performance and factors such as the size of the business, access to resources and female insufficiency have been used to account for differences in business performance. However, there are also issues with the methods and scales used for measuring performance. To this end, various researchers advocate for new approaches and methodologies such as redefining ‘success’ and ‘performance’ as a way of shattering misconceptions of underperformance in women-owned enterprises. Redefining performance measures, re-evaluating the association between gender and business performance and the use of non-conventional performance indicators, have also been suggested as a way forward. Inspired by these conflicting views and ongoing research, this paper uses the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and patriarchy as the theoretical frameworks, and feminist poststructural discourse analysis to critically evaluate the association between choice intentions and underperformance in the context of women-owned businesses in a patriarchal society such as Nigeria, where often success is not required, expected nor welcomed. The data drawn from 100 women entrepreneurs, found that ‘no choice’ or ‘forced choice’ impacted women’s entrepreneurial intentions and consequently, their business performance.
Keywords - Gender, Entrepreneurial Intentions, Patriarchy, Underperformance, TPB.