A Study on Female Entrepreneurs in Malaysia

This paper summarizes the impact of challenges within the scientific discussion on the issue of female entrepreneurship in Malaysia. In 67 countries of the world, approximately 126 millions of women have started a new business, and 98 millions of women are developing the already established businesses starting from 2012. However, the proportion of female entrepreneurs in general ranges from 1% to 40% in different countries around the world depending on the economic development, so the impact of women entrepreneurship on innovation and job creation is especially significant for developing countries, in particular for Malaysia. Throughout Malaysia's economic reforms, the small and medium business has played an important role in the growth of the economy of this country, the total number of Malaysian entrepreneurs is steadily increasing, and the government is implementing a significant number of entrepreneurship initiatives, although the number of women entrepreneurs in Malaysia is still lower than that of men entrepreneurs. The basis of the study was a highly structured method of deduction – the theoretical generalizations and the systematization of scientific developments of the researchers from different countries of the world formed the basis for the development of the hypothesis, and empirical studies were aimed at testing this hypothesis, explaining the causal relationships between the variables. The data for this study have been collected from a sample of 300 respondents, of which 120 are men, and 180 are women. The results of an empirical analysis of the survey data allowed to distinguish four main categories of factors that slow down the development of female entrepreneurship in Malaysia, namely resource, personal, economic, political, and cultural. Through the use of the regression analysis, the effect of all these factors (independent variables) on the growth of value added from the business carried out by the female entrepreneurs (dependent variable) was investigated in the article. The calculations showed that the correlation coefficient is 0.79, and the determination coefficient is 0.62. Testing the model for adequacy with t-statistics and p-value showed the significant impact of independent variables on the dependent one, which allows us to consider the proposed hypothesis to be confirmed. The results of the research can be useful for government officials, local authorities and entrepreneurs, not only in Malaysia but also in other countries.