Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to explore gender variations in entrepreneurship and internationalisation from the perspective of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm; in particular, the paper explores how differences in the personal idiosyncrasies of both males and females in part account for the variations in export internationalisation.

Design/methodology/approach

The study draws on extant literature on the critical success factors in entrepreneurship and internationalisation research (e.g. foreign market knowledge, firm-level technology and firm age) as the conceptual framework to explore the issue. The study is based on 21 male and 17 female export entrepreneurs from Ghana and uses a descriptive research design (i.e. frequencies and chi-square test) to analyse the results.

Findings

The results show that the perceptions of male and female exporters differ on key internationalisation success factors based on extant literature. Implicitly, whilst both groups shared a similar degree of basic knowledge on a few export success factors, across most of the other key export success factors, the male counterparts demonstrated a more expanded view compared to the females. The results support the assumption of the RBV theory applied in this study to argue that to account properly for the internationalisation outcomes of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the personality characteristics of the owner entrepreneurs are critical resources which cannot be ignored.

Research limitations/implications

In terms of limitation, the study is exploratory study based on non-probability sampling methods using descriptive frequencies tables and analysis of chi-square test and so readers must bear this limitation in mind in interpreting the results to improve on future studies.

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the empirical literature by offering a unique perspective regarding how women and men perceive and interpret export success factors and how that impacts on the internationalisation outcomes of women and men. The paper responds to calls by researchers (e.g. Terjesen et al., 2011; Ratten and Tajeddini, 2018; Kuschel and Labra, 2018; Javadian and Richards, 2020) to populate studies on the topic to deepen the present understanding. By using data from Ghana, West Africa, the study sheds a fresh insight on the topic from an under-studied and under-researched geographical context.

中文翻译：

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创业与国际化：男性和女性企业家对成功因素的看法有何不同

目的

本文的目的是从企业资源基础观（RBV）的角度探讨创业和国际化中的性别差异；该论文特别探讨了男性和女性个人特质的差异如何在一定程度上解释了出口国际化的差异。

设计/方法论/途径

该研究借鉴了关于创业和国际化研究中关键成功因素的现有文献（例如国外市场知识、企业层面的技术和企业年龄）作为探讨该问题的概念框架。该研究以加纳 21 名男性和 17 名女性出口企业家为对象，采用描述性研究设计（即频率和卡方检验）来分析结果。

发现

结果表明，根据现有文献，男性和女性出口商对关键国际化成功因素的看法不同。隐含地，虽然两个群体对一些出口成功因素的基本知识程度相似，但在大多数其他关键出口成功因素中，男性同行比女性表现出更广泛的视野。结果支持了本研究中应用的RBV理论的假设，即为了正确解释中小企业的国际化成果，所有者企业家的人格特征是不可忽视的关键资源。

研究局限性/影响

就局限性而言，该研究是基于非概率抽样方法的探索性研究，使用描述性频率表和卡方检验分析，因此读者在解释结果时必须牢记这一局限性，以便改进未来的研究。

原创性/价值

该论文通过提供关于女性和男性如何看待和解释出口成功因素及其如何影响女性和男性国际化成果的独特视角，为实证文献做出了贡献。该论文响应了研究人员（例如 Terjesen等人，2011 年；Ratten 和 Tajeddini，2018 年；Kuschel 和 Labra，2018 年；Javadian 和 Richards，2020 年）的号召，填充有关该主题的研究，以加深目前的理解。通过使用西非加纳的数据，该研究从未充分研究和研究的地理背景中对该主题提供了新的见解。