Competitive strategy decisions and the influence of gender: study of corporate women in Spain

Abstract

In the last decades there has been an evident increase in research andpublications of the phenomenon of women entrepreneurs, due to theincrease of women entrepreneurs in the business world. Unfortunately,the number of women entrepreneurs is even lower than men, and theperformance of their companies is lower than of firms controlled by men.The current research aims to discover whether men and women havedifferent strategic formulations, by analyzing competitive strategies ofdifferentiation, innovation and market expansion. The results were obtainedfrom a sample of the adult population survey (APS) Global EntrepreneurshipMonitor of Spain in 2009 using a logit model, it was foundthat there are not large differences in strategic behavior between menand women, and differences were found only in the competitive strategyof innovation, where being a woman influences positively the selectionof this strategy.