Female entrepreneurs and financing

Our paper presents some results from a research on women's entrepreneurship in Belgium, which is part of a wider project called “Diane”, which took place within the framework of an equal opportunity action. We choose to expose one of the most interesting aspects of this research on women’s entrepreneurship : financing. The main question of our research was to enquire whether there are any specificities in the women’s entrepreneurship in Belgium as regards the financing of their firms. First, we investigated the amounts that female entrepreneurs invested for the start-up and development of their firms. Second, we aimed to determine which financing sources were used by female entrepreneurs. Finally, we enquired whether they had access to external financing, and more specifically to bank loans. Our results show that female entrepreneurs have mainly recourse to their personal savings or to family and friends’ loans to finance the company start-up and development. But they use also bank loans in a great extent for their firm launching. Nevertheless, it seems that they apply for bank loans only if they have no other choice, due to their strong risk-aversion and their lack of trust toward bankers. These reasons also lead them to invest lower amounts in the start-up and development of their companies. Female entrepreneurs face a lot of barriers to bank financing. There are several specific financing problems for female entrepreneurs, related to some of their firm’s characteristics, especially the field of activity and the size. Some gender characteristics can also be barriers to financing. On the basis of our results, we draw some recommendations for public authorities.