Why women become entrepreneurs: the Italian hospitality sector at the dawn of mass tourism

Hospitality is a privileged sector for investigating female entrepreneurship due to the traditional involvement of women in this industry. Historical documentation as well as novels have sketched profiles of female hotelkeepers since the xviii century. It is no coincidence that historians have often included hospitality, along with textiles, food, drinks and retailing, among the industries that tend to be dominated by women in many western countries including Italy, the US and the United Kingdom. However, at a closer look we can see that this industry has never shared the general features of women’s businesses such as a prevalently female clientele, gender polarisation and the acquisition of skills through family life. First of all, a male clientele has also been very important for accommodations run by women. Secondly, the scant evidence available shows a gender balance more than feminisation: for instance, in the city of Baltimore (USA) before WWII no more than 60% of landlords were female 7 and when we take into consideration the entire hospitality sector the ratio significantly decreased. The two case studies we deal with in sections 2 and 3 (the Umbria region and the province of Rimini) reveal percentages between 46% and 66% from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. More complex is the evaluation of the role played by domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning and food shopping in building female entrepreneurs’ skills. There is no doubt that some important competences such as personnel management, reception of clients, and advertising, cannot be acquired through household management. This does not mean that the family is irrelevant. In fact, strategic management and organisational models have widely recognised the importance of tacit knowledge8, which is often transferred through generations in a family context9, in addition to networking, passion and motivation. Consequently, we need to understand what mix of family knowledge and work experiences contributed to the accumulation of skills which permitted women to run accommodations for a wide clientele. Gamber raised the same issue for female entrepreneurs in the textile industry and found that sewing skills accumulated through families were usually accompanied by knowledge of the sector and the ability to recognise market opportunities acquired through work experiences in textile factories10. The traditional view of knowledge transfer in the feminised niche needs to be substantiated and enriched with more detailed analyses. This would also enable us to better understand how and why many landladies overcame barriers and moved up the value chain, creating and running larger and higher-quality hotels (see section 4). To advance the understanding of women in business, we carried out semi-structured interviews with 31 female entrepreneurs from different Italian regions. The interviewees were aged between 30 and 93 years and have all gone through different phases of the history of Italian tourism. Although they were also allowed to speak freely, we proposed 5 blocks of questions, respectively: 1. their family history, including business aspects; 2. their educational and training path; 3. who and why decided to start the business; 4. who did and does tasks and how (that is, how is the business organised); and 5. which aspects have changed over time. Each interviewee provided a representation of her entrepreneurial behaviour and a description of the environment in which she took decisions. If they were second or third generation entrepreneurs they were also asked to describe the entrepreneurial experiences of their parents and grandparents. We also interviewed 38 men in order to compare the different entrepreneurial paths and get information about mothers and grandmothers who had eventually run the business before them. Collecting information about the previous generations also enables us to understand the memory and the narrative about female entrepreneurs inside the family. Overall, the interviews provided an opportunity to reflect on the correct way to identify female entrepreneurial rofiles. Thirty years ago, Gartner11 posited this by asking “who is the entrepreneur?” But this was the wrong question. At the time the trait approach (as Gartner called it) which had become mainstream, profiled the set of characteristics required to be an entrepreneur. According to this view entrepreneurship was a consequence of these attributes. The result was the identification of psychological profiles suitable for supporting “dangerous and unpredictable” entrepreneurial activities. This new hero of modernity was portrayed as a mix of attitudes usually characterising a man’s behaviour in contemporary western society. This approach had two main consequences for the investigation of the way women ran their businesses: first, the assessment of female entrepreneurship on the basis of similarities with this pre-defined male profile and consequently the search for a “collection of exceptional women” which met it12; and secondly, the underestimation of features usually associated with female culture. “The extent to which entrepreneurship is understood as a masculine construct is overstated anyway since there appears to be much influence from leadership styles and features commonly associated with feminised cultural markers, notably emotion, and including support, relationships, and consideration, at least as features of emotional intelligence”. Although the trait approach has many negative and unwanted consequences14, it has been widely used in business history. Also some seminal works about women’s businesses have not avoided this interpretative scheme. In this paper we try to provide a different narrative, based on the behavioural approach which “places the entrepreneur within the process of new venture creation”. We are not looking for the main characteristics of female entrepreneurs, but we want to know why they started their business, how they do things, and if their behaviour has changed from one generation to another. We do not compare female entrepreneurs to a male norm, but we focus on the process of entrepreneurship and patterns of variation instead of the traditionally measured average differences. This approach is also suitable for interacting with feminist theory, which posits that masculine and feminine are neither binary nor fixed, but performative18. In addition, post- structuralist studies have conceptualised gender as ‘social practices and representations associated with femininity or masculinity’. Putting together these two strands of literature, Bruni, Gherardi, and Poggio20 claim that gender and entrepreneurship are enacted, rather than being properties of the individual. This approach has also been extended to the investigation of informal business. Therefore, in section 3 we will analyse the process of entrepreneurship of 5 female entrepreneurs born between 1923 and 1949, who started their business during the golden age of mass tourism, in order to see their motivations and accomplishments.