Women Entrepreneurs from Southern India: An Exploratory Study

This study profiles women entrepreneurs who own and manage small- to medium- sized enterprises in two southern Indian states—Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Based on their reasons for starting a business, the women are classified into three cate gories : 'chance', 'forced' and 'created or pulled' entrepreneurs. The paper argues that while there are similarities between these three groups in terms of certain demographic variables, they do differ in terms of critical business variables such as sales volume, expected growth and success factors. The start-up problems faced by the women entrepreneurs in this study are similar to those encountered by their counterparts elsewhere. However, the level of work—family conflicts are found to be lower in the case of the former.