1 Introduction

In the world of entrepreneurship, one of the important enduring problems is to exclude entrepreneurship of elderly people since entrepreneurship has been considered as an economic activity for younger individuals (Loretto and White 2006). Although the definitions and measures vary extensively, people above the age of 55–70 are considered senior. In this paper, we consider individuals who are above the age of retirement, which varies by country and industry, as elderly and senior. Research on entrepreneurship demonstrates the main reason for exclusion of older people comes from the characteristics of entrepreneurship, which is often associated with youth, dynamism and risk-taking behaviour (Williams and Shahid 2016; Dimitratos et al. 2016; Jin et al. 2014; Robson et al. 2016; Jin et al. 2014). For instance, Smallbone et al. (2016) explain senior entrepreneurs are presumed to have achieved greater experience and accrued assets (including social ones such as networks) and wealth. Entrepreneurship involves risk-taking behaviour, and younger people take more risk with entrepreneurial activity since they often have less accumulated wealth in comparison to senior entrepreneurs.

Since age has been considered as a significant problem in entrepreneurship, we explore senior entrepreneurs as one of the disadvantaged groups. Also, we reflect gender diversity in senior entrepreneurship because some studies (e.g. Verheul and Thurik 2001) demonstrate gender difference does matter since women have fewer labour market opportunities and record more incidents of career discontinuities. Also, women are likely to accumulate less wealth and less experience at management levels in comparison to men (Hundley 2001).

In the first section, we examine how we understand senior entrepreneurs and their characteristics in comparison to entrepreneurship of young people. In the second section, we raise gender diversity as one of the important issues in senior entrepreneurship. In the third section, we provide intersectionality perspective in women entrepreneurship. We conclude the chapter elaborating the need for considering seniority in entrepreneurship theory and policy.

2 Unpacking the Concept of Senior Entrepreneurship Through a Gender Perspective

There are different types of entrepreneurship based on the purpose and/or features of individuals who pursue entrepreneurial activities. In this chapter, since we explore age diversity and older individuals, we consider senior entrepreneurship as an enterprise of elderly people. The importance of this research comes from the difference between young and old individuals in entrepreneurship. For instance, Smallbone et al. (2016) point out this difference towards considering the points of experience and owned capitals. In comparison to young individuals, they emphasise that older entrepreneurs have more experience and social capital that refers to personal networks in a field. Also, some other reasons such as socio-demographic changes, ageing population and rising unemployment create drivers for becoming senior entrepreneurs at a later age (Pilkova et al. 2014). Research indicates that senior entrepreneurship is going to become more common form of entrepreneurship than it is today in the future.

There is not a consensus for the definition regarding entrepreneurship of elderly individuals. For this reason, many researchers (e.g. Singh and Denoble 2003; Weber and Schaper 2004) in entrepreneurship field have made various attempts to describe entrepreneurship of elderly people. This type of entrepreneurship has been referred to grey, older, mature, silver and third-age entrepreneurship. However, we adopt senior entrepreneurship (seniorpreneurs) in this chapter. In addition to conceptualising senior entrepreneurs, another issue is to describe the clear-cut age to define it. Whilst some research consider the age to be above 40–60, some international organisations such as European Commission and OECD (Halabisky et al. 2012; Kautonen 2013) consider senior entrepreneurs who are older than 54 years old.

Experience is critical for success of entrepreneurs. Because senior entrepreneurs have more experience than the younger entrepreneurs, senior entrepreneurs do not only enjoy more accumulated wealth but also enjoy richer experience from their previous careers. However, the experiences of men and women differ in senior entrepreneurship. The main reason for this difference stems from gender-based personalities and challenges. For instance, women have fewer labour market opportunities or record career discontinuities. They also have less experience in management levels (Verheul and Thurik 2001). Wagner (2006) claims that women have higher risk aversion in comparison with the features of entrepreneurship. The evidence demonstrates that women may have more challenges than men since there is a gender-based experience in senior entrepreneurship. Furthermore, considering that there is a life cycle of discrimination (Ozturk and Ozbilgin 2015) that women experience from cradle to retirement, feminisation of poverty (Chant 2008) means that women have less capital than men to engage with entrepreneurial activity.

Since seniorpreneurs have experience and knowledge on work, they also own social capital that refers to the actual and potential resources individuals acquire from their relationship with others with regard to the previously held organisational status and reputation (Baron and Markman 2000). Thus, social networks of seniorpreneurs help them achieve success in their business. This situation creates a unique advantage for seniorpreneurs in comparison to younger entrepreneurs.

In the next section, we explore gender diversity and senior entrepreneurship through providing evidence from empirical studies.

3 Understanding Gender Diversity and Senior Entrepreneurship

One of the important questions that we raise in this section is why gender diversity does matter in senior entrepreneurship. In order to unveil the reasons that justify the importance of gender diversity in the entrepreneurship, we theorise these concepts in the section. Following the discussion on the concepts, we adopt an intersectionality perspective in the next section.

Men and women have different physical and psychological characteristics. There is also a historically built prejudice and discrimination against women across most field of life and work. Even when the discrimination is not avert, still more subtle and covert forms of discrimination (Roos 2009) exist against women in societies and economic activity. One of the subtler forms of discrimination is the deficit approach (Dill 1979) that women suffer in the dominant economic systems. The deficit approach means that women are considered as lacking requisite forms of education, experience, skills and capitals to be successful in business. As a result of the deficit approach, policy efforts focus on fixing women rather than the inequality regime (Acker 2006) which leads to the failure of women. As an example of this deficit approach, scholars may present the arguments that female-owned companies underperform in comparison to male-owned companies, without explaining the structural and systemic discrimination that lead to women’s failure in business ownership (Ahl and Marlow 2012). The deficit approach essentialises gender differences and entrenches the belief that women are less competent than men in entrepreneurship. Developing counterarguments of deficit approach is somewhat difficult (Robb and Watson 2012; Wilson and Tagg 2010) because based on the research of Ahl (2004, p. 165) who provides a critical evaluation of comparative dataset related to sexes, ‘somehow all men get to be free riders on their few growth-oriented fellow businessmen’. Since the institutionalised norms and values are male-dominant, society considers women deficient across many fields (Ahl and Nelson 2010). Even though the deficit approach has been heavily criticised in academic circles, Ahl and Marlow (2012, pp. 545–546) state that ‘women are offered business advice, training and support strategies to equip them with the necessary resources, attitudes and behaviours to address their gender related deficiency’. Thus, the burden on fixing the inequality regime falls on women. This presents an almost an impossible challenge, considering that women are not the main holders of power and status which is required to make economic activity more egalitarian for both genders.

Entrepreneurship is sometimes considered an alternative career model for women who can face discrimination and challenges in the male-dominated corporations because the main advantage of being an entrepreneur is to have greater flexibility, a space for creativity and self-fulfillment (Braches and Elliott 2017). This is a model that only considers young women entrepreneurs. However, many women do not have the opportunity and budget for adopting entrepreneurship for their early career stages. For this reason, senior women entrepreneurs are another case that includes experience and capitals for their entrepreneurial ventures, with the caveat that the life cycle of gender discrimination may mean less accumulated wealth in older age for women in comparison to men.

Seniorpreneurship is dominated by men in most countries such as Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the USA (Weber and Schaper 2004; Kautonen 2008; Tervo 2014). Within the European Union countries, in general, women are more likely to own home-based businesses and work part-time, and therefore they make up a minority of self-employed people, and this has been the case for the last 20 years (Marlow and McAdam 2013; Tomlinson and Colgan 2014). Particularly, in Britain although the number of olderpreneurs has increased considerably, women only make up 25% of olderpreneurs (Tomlinson and Colgan 2014). Increasingly professional women at older ages have been considering self-employment as a viable option (Hodges 2012). Recent studies have reported that in the USA, the number of women entrepreneurs is increasing by age (Kerr 2017).

Business start-up motivations are multifaceted, and there are multiple reasons for both men and women (Wach et al. 2016; Walker and Webster 2007; Parry and Mallett 2016), and the literature often groups these motives into ‘push’ (necessity) and ‘pull’ (opportunity) factors (Carsrud and Brannback 2011; Hodges 2012; Orhan and Scott 2001) which are also used in analysing seniorpreneurs. Women have often been found to be pushed into business ownership due to reasons such as family commitments (i.e. work-life balance issues), frustration faced with inequalities preventing them to move to higher positions in organisations and dissatisfaction and perceptions of working in a job with dominant masculine business culture (Hodges 2012; Kirkwood 2009; McKay 2001). Similarly, reasons reported for older people are that they are being pushed of the labour market due to age discrimination, redundancy and lack of attractive employment options (Parry and Mallett 2016). Recent GEM Report on Senior Entrepreneurship explained that senior women displayed a necessity motivation to entrepreneurship as they lacked other options for sustainable livelihoods (GEM Report 2016–17).

Many studies suggest that women face difficulties in becoming self-employed which encompasses senior women, such as lower levels of education mainly in developing countries, lack of female models in the business sector, problem of obtaining financial capital, lower status in society and a culturally induced lack of assertiveness and confidence in their ability to succeed in business (GEM Report 2016–17, p. 26).

Senior entrepreneurs do not represent a homogeneous group (Curran and Blackburn 2001; Mallett and Wapshott 2015), and more comprehensive qualitative studies should be conducted on senior entrepreneurs’ motivations for self-employment, particularly examining gender, ethnicity and class dimensions, along other dimensions such as religion, culture and sexual orientation (Kautonen 2008; Mallett and Wapshott 2015; Wainwright et al. 2015). In addition, most studies have considered women entrepreneurs as a homogenous group, and they have not explored the age dimension on their self-employment decisions (Marlow and Carter 2004; O’Neil et al. 2008; Hodges 2012). This section investigates studies conducted on the senior women entrepreneurs. The limited number of studies, which explored senior women entrepreneurs, reported several reasons for business ownership. These are explored by drawing attention to reasons cited by younger women entrepreneurs and applied to olderpreneurs.

One of the important factors leading older women into entrepreneurs is their perception that their gender and age might act as a barrier for them in continuing their work in salaried employment (as well as the perception that they may be lacking business skills) (Kautonen 2008). It is argued that both men and women experience ageism (Tomlinson and Colgan 2014); however women are more likely to be discriminated at work due to ‘gendered ageism’ (Duncan and Loretto 2004). Business ownership has been traditionally considered as dominated by men, and women who have worked together with their spouses or brother have been invisible partners (Mulholland 1997; Walker and Webster 2007). In addition to gender barrier, age has also been a problem for particularly women in their working life (Walker and Webster 2007).

One explanation for lower start-up rate among senior women related with perception is given by McKay (2001), who in her study conducted ten interviews of older women entrepreneurs in Canada. She explained that career aspirations suitable for younger women were not acceptable for generations of women before. Although gender roles would be changing, older women found their options ‘limited by perceptions of what is acceptable for their generation and age group’ (p. 6). Older generations have grown up in a time when women were less likely to pursue careers outside home and this might affect their behaviour. McKay (2001) explained that older women believed that their age, gender and work experience acted as a barrier for them in finding salaried jobs, supporting the argument of Mirchandani (1999) that gendered processes are implicit in organisational structures and occupations when considering employment choice.

Furthermore, due to the gendered ageism that older women experience, the skills that they have gained through employment or the independence and leadership or problem-solving skills that they have gained when raising a family may not be recognised in organisational employment. Culmination of the deficit treatment that they receive might make entrepreneurship a more viable option for them (McKay 2001; Weber and Schaper 2004). At the same time, societal values can also negatively impact women’s efforts to start their businesses. On the other hand, the real and perceived barriers that older women face when starting their businesses and their lack of confidence regarding business skills (compared to younger women entrepreneurs, they have less up to date business skills due to changing educational system and more recent legislative information) also limit their self-employment options (Walker and Webster 2007).

Similar to the findings of the studies conducted on younger women, one of the common reasons that motivate older women into entrepreneurship is the negative experiences which they have faced at previous organisations in which they were employed (Hodges 2012; Walker and Webster 2007). For example, Hodges’ (2012) study that examined 100 midlife women who moved into self-employment from organisational employment reported that dissatisfaction and negative organisational experience directed them to start up their own businesses. Walker and Webster’s (2007) study on both women (younger and older) and men (younger and older) also explained that the redundancy and lack of advancement and the inability to find suitable alternative employment were the greatest reason for older women to start up their women businesses.

Work-life balance and flexibility related to family needs (such as childcare or supporting the husband’s career) emerges to be significant business start-up motivators for women entrepreneurs at younger ages (Birley 1989; Still and Soutar 2001; Kirkwood 2009); however some studies on older women entrepreneurs report that this reason influences them less, assuming that childcare is no longer an issue (McKay 2001; Parry and Mallett 2016).

One of the key and traditional reasons for self-employment is generating more income and gaining independence. These two reasons are confirmed by studies conducted on older women. Women at older ages who have outlived their partners have set up businesses for additional income, overcome ageism and gained mental inspiration and self-esteem after children had grown up and left home (Kautonen et al. 2008; McKay 2001; Wainwright et al. 2015). There are also studies that argue that as individuals get older, they are less willing to invest energy and enthusiasm in self-employment activities and take risks (Curran and Blackburn 2001; Krekula 2007; Levesque and Minniti 2006). However, there are studies which contradict these findings and argue that for older professional women, self-employment has provided an avenue for them to be more independent and apply their earlier managerial capabilities and leadership skills (Hodges 2012).

4 Intersectionality Perspective in Women Seniorpreneurs/Gender and Intersectionality in Senior Entrepreneurship

As has been argued above, seniorpreneurship is an important concept because seniorpreneurs sit at the nexus of enterprise-related as well as age-related experiences and may fall through the safety nets that national governments traditionally offer for vulnerable groups in entrepreneurship. The intersectional nature of the seniorpreneurial experience, like in other forms of intersectional experiences, presents participants with unique lived realities that are not present in an additive manner but rather which sets them within complex and often surprising trajectories (Tatli and Özbilgin 2012). An intersectional approach to senior entrepreneurship helps us identify pertinent antecedents, correlates and consequences of entrepreneurial experience for different socio-demographic groups and how, in specific contexts, these factors combine to facilitate older people’s ambitions for entrepreneurship.

Yet, experiences of seniorpreneurs are often examined within a single-dimensional analytical framework and are therefore invisible in the intersectional literature. For example, Kibler et al. (2015) have argued that ‘one of the reasons for the declining rate of enterprising activity for the over-50s is that they may find it difficult to adapt to the dominant enterprise culture, which often praises a “youthful” image of the entrepreneur’ (p. 195; Andersen and Warren 2011, cited in Kibler et al. 2015). Indeed other research suggests that ideas and notions regarding older people’s entrepreneurial ability in a society have an impact on their propensity to engage in business formation (Kautonen 2012). Further studies have also identified that discriminatory perceptions relating to older people’s ability to start and run businesses can negatively impact their emotions and confidence (Hamilton 2013). The issue though is that in this regard, age is often identified as the overriding factor in their experience.

In the previous section, we have called for an examination of gender-related experiences in senior entrepreneurship discourse. We have contended that existing research on seniorpreneurship fails to consider the gender-related circumstances of female seniorpreneurs and how their location in gendered spaces impacts on their experiences of enterprise. Even where gender is considered, there is a tendency to consider its effect as additive or consequential only (Valdez 2011). The argument in the section above highlights studies that demonstrate that women have fewer labour market opportunities or record career discontinuities which has an impact on expertise and experience in starting businesses, limited accumulation of resources and less experience at management levels in comparison to men (Verheul and Thurik 2001). The section argues for an examination of older women and enterprise that takes an intersectional approach, recognising the complexity of their experiences as generated by multi-categorical and multilevel strands of inequality.

An intersectional approach relates to the way in which different strands of disadvantage link together in a complex dynamic to result in a multiple burden. The primary argument of this perspective is that multiple dimensions of individual and collective identity, in particular those based on gender, ethnicity, class, age and race, interconnect to produce, sustain, change and yet reinforce particular lived experiences of members who are similarly positioned within a highly stratified society (Valdez 2011). Romeroa and Valdez argue that an intersectional perspective acknowledges that structure and agency work codependently to ‘condition, reflect, and…reproduce a given social group’s intersectional positioning’ (2016, p. 1554). Bradley (2015) outlines the value of using an intersectional approach. She suggests that firstly it circumvents the simplistic focus on a single dimension of identity and reveals other forms by which oppression is manifest; secondly, she proposes there are multiple interconnecting relationships operating within any given social interaction; and, finally, Bradley says intersectional lens can reveal some of the most extreme forms of disadvantage. Similarly, Healy (2015) points to the importance of an awareness of history, society and biography when considering disadvantage and limitations in individual choice.

Writers on seniorpreneurship have highlighted the difficulties that seniors face in starting and running their businesses Curran and Blackburn 2001. As such there is a justified focus on age-related issues in enterprise. However, at the intersection of gender and other social and demographic factors such as poverty, ethnicity, social space, disability and age, the chances of being excluded from participation in business formation and entrepreneurship increase (Forson 2013). Gender, ethnicity and class are important dimensions through which inequality can be experienced (Wingfield and Taylor 2016). As such there is a need for a multilayered intersectional analysis of experiences of seniorpreneurship.

Intersectionality research has demonstrated that entrepreneurship experience is not one-dimensional. As such there cannot be a one-dimensional experience of senior entrepreneurship. Studies that use an intersectional framework to examine the business start-up environment, the value of the community and family involvement, constraints and enablements, business start-up motivations and experiences of running or managing a business point to a more dynamic relationship between structure and agency in terms of both privilege and disadvantage. For example, studies on women’s businesses have consistently demonstrated that business ownership experience among women can differ by ethnicity and race.

Forson (2011), for example, has demonstrated how gender and ethnicity shape the entrepreneurial motivations of African and Caribbean women in the legal and hairdressing sectors of London, in the UK. She found that Caribbean women’s declared motivations for embarking on business ownership included classic ‘pull’ factors such as the ‘need for achievement’, ‘need for control’ and the recognition of an opportunity which are associated with personal characteristics, whereas African women’s (mainly migrants) motivations centred more on their sociocultural experiences, motherhood, migrant experiences and unfavourable labour market conditions. Obviously, there are clear intra-group differences (based on ethnicity) that are worth interrogating for a more complete understanding of female enterprise.

Fielden and Davidson’s (2012) study concluded that Islamic values caused Muslim women entrepreneurs to pursue family funds for business start-up instead of government funding. Research on Asian women in the UK and Taiwanese women in Taiwan found that they had different access to ethnic- and gender-related resources within their community stratified by cultural and social institutions such as marriage, kinship ties and social networks (Dhaliwal, 2000; Wing Fai 2016).

Senior women from particular groups may experience entrepreneurship in complex ways that need to be examined using multiple lenses that engage the macro, meso and micro levels of business ownership. Migrant seniors, for example, will have differing experiences from native seniors. Migrant women who have some experience of running businesses across borders in their premigration life are at an advantage in terms of garnering resources and support, compared to those who have not (Collins and Low 2010). Although all women in all communities carry a disproportionate weight of domestic and caring responsibilities, gendered norms in some of migrant communities put an even greater caring responsibility on women to look after ageing relatives, grandchildren, etc.

In their analyses of gay men’s and lesbian women’s entrepreneurial activities, Marlow et al. (2017) conclude that there are no differences between their sample and heterosexual men and women. Nevertheless they critique ‘contemporary analyses of gender which assume[s] it (gender) is an end point rather than a foundation for analysing gender as a multiplicity’ (p. 1) and make a case for employing an intersectional lens in looking at entrepreneurship.

Although intersectionality has been used primarily as either a theoretical lens or a methodological framework (Marfelt 2016), it can be used appropriately to examine power relations within a given context (Zander et al. 2010). Further intersectionality studies have, in the main, focused on oppression and the experience of inequality (Bagilhole 2010). However, Nash (2008) suggests that an intersectional approach is broad enough to provide space for the examination of privilege and oppression and the nexus of these two functions in the individual’s life. So, for example, in Hamilton’s (2013) research referred to above, although older entrepreneurs are more likely to be subjected to emotional oppression (Hamilton 2013), they would at the same time be more mature and therefore more likely to have the emotional resilience to deal with discriminatory pressures. Forson’s (2013) work on African and Caribbean women, for example, has shown how class privilege can mediate the effects of ethnic disadvantage in starting and managing a business for black women lawyers compared to their hairdresser counterparts. She also found that gender mediated the negative effects of the ethnic penalty for black women compared to black men.

In the light of existing research on female entrepreneurship, we have argued in this section for using an intersectional lens to examine the entrepreneurship experiences of older women. Such a lens would enable the problematisation of the treatment of older entrepreneurs as a homogenous group both in terms of gender and other categories. It has argued that seniorpreneurs’ experiences should be investigated in terms of the links between the broader, historical and socio-economic contexts. Questions that may need to be asked are related to the impacts of gender, ethnicity and class, rooted in historical and contemporary labour market experiences of women on their choice of self-employment as a belated career strategy.

Entrepreneurial experiences, specifically evidence on the mobilisation of resources (human, social and financial capital), have indicated differences and similarities between men and women. More particularly it has also revealed differences between different groups of women, indicating that the intersection of ethnicity, class, gender, migration, sexuality, etc. can create dissimilar outcomes for seemingly similar groups of people. Evidently, an analysis of the ways in which female seniorpreneurship is embedded in social structures and the way these structures interact with each other is essential to understanding female senior small businesses. In essence small businesses are stratification-based organisational structures that are dependent on, support and reproduce the segregation of different women in society into specified occupational categories. This notion must be interrogated in any examination of older women’s entrepreneurship.

5 Conclusion

We illustrated in this chapter that studying entrepreneurship from the perspective of elder workers is important because seniorpreneurs remain an understudied group. We explained that there is utility in studying seniorpreneurs for development of entrepreneurship theory of policy. The theoretical development comes from the need to study entrepreneurship from an intersectional lens. As we illustrated in this chapter, entrepreneurial experience varies by socio-demographic characteristics of the entrepreneur. As such studies of entrepreneurship should consider intersectionality of the entrepreneurial experience. This suggestion will address the current assumption of universality that some studies of entrepreneurship do not consider gender, ethnicity and other socio-demographic attributes of entrepreneurship in design and field work stages. In terms of policy, we illustrated that seniorpreneurs are not a homogenous group of individuals. So, any policy interventions which seek to promote or offer protection for seniorpreneurs should attend to intersectional needs of this group. The failure to attend to intersectionality of the seniorpreneurs may result in further entrenchment of inequalities in society and work. Our exploration of the intersectional approach suggests that studies and policy interventions should move from a universalistic stance towards an appreciation of the unique nature of the intersectional experience and the possibilities of identifying most vulnerable seniorpreneurs with a view to support their entrepreneurial pursuits.