Networks around entrepreneurs: Gendering in China and countries around the Persian Gulf

Purpose: Entrepreneurs are networking with others to get advice for their businesses. The networking differs between men and women; notably, men are more often networking in the public sphere and women are more often networking in the private sphere. The aim here is to account for how such gendering of entrepreneurs’ networks differ between societies and cultures.
Research Design: Based on survey data from the Global Entrepreneurships Monitor, a sample of 16,365 entrepreneurs is used to compare the gendering of entrepreneurs’ networks in China, and five countries largely located around the Persian Gulf, namely Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates.
Findings: Analyses show that female entrepreneurs tend to have slightly larger private sphere networks than male entrepreneurs. The differences between male and female entrepreneurs’ networking in the public sphere are considerably larger. Societal differences in the relative prominence of networking in the public and private spheres, and the gendering hereof, correspond well to cultural and socio-economic societal differences. In particular, we found marked differences between religiously conservative and politically autocratic Gulf states.
Research limitations/implications: As a main limitation to this study, the data disclose only the gender of the entrepreneur, but not the gender of the entrepreneur’s contacts in the network. Thus, we cannot tell the extent to which men and women interact with each other. This limitation along with the findings of this study point to a need for further research on the extent to which genders are structurally mixed or seperated as entrepreneurs network for advice in the public sphere. In addition, the large migrant populations in some Arab states raise questions of the ethnicity of entrepreneurs and network members.
Originality/value: Results from this study create novel and nuanced understandings about the differences in the gendering of entrepreneurs’ networking in China and countries around Persian Gulf. Such understandings provide valuable input to the knowledge of how to better utilize the entrepreneurial potential from both men and women in different cultures. The sample is fairly representative of entrepreneurs populations and the results can be generalized to these counties.