Why aren’t there more women entrepreneurs?
This question has plagued educators for decades.
Despite a steady rise in female-led startups, women remain underrepresented in entrepreneurship, often due to unequal access to resources, support, and confidence-boosting opportunities:
- In 2023, women-owned businesses received just 21% of SBA loans.
- In 2021, female founders secured only 2% of venture capital in the United States
At this pace, it’ll take 108 years to close the entrepreneurial gender gap completely.
Can We Decrease the Gender Gap?
A recent study from members of our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community suggests we can – and the solution is surprisingly effective:
Experiential learning significantly boosts the confidence levels of aspiring women entrepreneurs.
This isn’t just an encouraging trend, it’s a breakthrough.
So much so that the research won Best Paper in the Management Education Track and Best Overall Conference Paper at the 2024 Eastern Academy of Management conference:
Increasing Women Entrepreneurs’ Confidence
At the heart of this research is entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE): a person’s belief in their ability to successfully launch a new venture.
Prior studies have shown that men consistently report higher ESE than women, a gap that contributes to the underrepresentation of women in entrepreneurship.
So, the research team—Drs. Heidi Bertels, Nancy Forster-Holt, Meg Weber, and Doan Winkel—asked a key question:
Can experiential entrepreneurship education close the ESE gap between men and women?
They focused on programs where students learn by doing, building real-world entrepreneurial skills through experience, rather than just reading cases or listening to lectures.
The Result
The team analyzed surveys from 3,243 entrepreneurship students across 119 colleges and universities worldwide, all of whom used the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC).
What they discovered was remarkable:
When women engaged in experiential entrepreneurship programs, the entrepreneurial self-efficacy gap between them and men disappeared entirely.
In other words, curricula like ExEC don’t just help students learn entrepreneurship, they help level the playing field.
Enabling Women Entrepreneurs In Your Program
If you’re an educator wondering how to support female entrepreneurs in your classroom, here are a few experiential entrepreneurship activities that can help build confidence and boost ESE:
- Pilot Your Purpose: Help students define why entrepreneurship matters to them so they have a reason to learn entrepreneurial skills.
- Customer Interviewing: Lower students’ anxiety around customer interviewing and build their confidence with a crawl-walk-run approach to conversations.
- MeetFlex: Our AI-powered tool lets you build entrepreneurship games like Jeopardy and Blooket in seconds, engaging all types of learners.
Try the Award-Winning ExEC Curriculum
The Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum used in this study isn’t just research-backed—it’s classroom-tested on thousands of students.
With ExEC, you’ll get:
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A fully experiential course
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Engaging activities designed to build real-world skills
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A curriculum that boosts entrepreneurial self-efficacy—especially for underrepresented groups
Use Our Data
Want to explore how an experiential curriculum impacts different student groups in your own research?
We found interesting results that can impact how we approach our teaching and we want to help others explore it too.
Request access to the data for your own research by clicking the button below
