Perceptions of Entrepreneurship Among Graduate Students: Challenges, Opportunities, and Cultural Biases

TL;DR

This study explores graduate students' perceptions of entrepreneurship, highlighting challenges like resource limitations and cultural biases, especially gender discrimination, which affect women's opportunities in digital entrepreneurship.

Contribution

It provides new insights into students' perceptions of entrepreneurship in a digital context, emphasizing gender biases and cultural challenges affecting future entrepreneurs.

Findings

Students find entrepreneurship attractive but are hesitant to start soon.

Gender discrimination persists, limiting women's opportunities in entrepreneurship.

Cultural biases and resource constraints are major obstacles.

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to examine the perceptions of entrepreneurship of graduate students enrolled in a digital-oriented entrepreneurship course, focusing on the challenges and opportunities related to starting a business. In today's digital era, businesses heavily depend on tailored software solutions to facilitate their operational processes, foster expansion, and enhance their competitive edge, thus assuming, to a certain degree, the characteristics of software companies. For data gathering, we used online exploratory surveys. The findings indicated that although entrepreneurship was considered an attractive option by students, very few of them declared that they intended to start a business soon. The main issues raised by the students were internal traits and external obstacles, such as lack of resources and support. Gender discrimination and cultural biases persist, limiting opportunities and equality for women. In terms of gender, women face limited representation in leadership roles, are expected to do more unpaid 'family work', are perceived as less capable in ding business, and need to prove their skills. Even if women are less discriminated now, both genders agree that women still face discrimination in business domain. In terms of percentages, women mentioned gender discrimination in higher percentages. Addressing these issues requires awareness, education, and policy changes to ensure fair treatment and opportunities for women.