The Role of Gender in Opportunity Identification

Opportunity identification is rapidly becoming a key focal point of research in the entrepreneurship domain. This study is the first to explore gender differences in opportunity identification. Utilizing two distinct samples (95 senior undergraduate students, 189 entrepreneurs in two high–technology industries), we found that women and men utilize their unique stocks of human capital to identify opportunities and that they use fundamentally different processes of opportunity identification. However, we did not find any difference in the innovativeness of the opportunities identified. This research contributes both to the opportunity identification literature and to theories of social feminism by showing empirically that although women and men utilize different processes to identify opportunities, neither process is inherently superior.