Women start entrepreneurial business predominantly in the sectors of trade and services (RICHARDSEN; BURKE, 2000; SANNER, 2000; SOLTÉSZ, 2000), being generally small business (BAYGAN, 2000; BOCHNIARZ, 2000; RICHARDSEN; BURKE, 2000; SANNER, 2000; ZAPALSKA, 1997) and most of these businesses do not begin with more than 10 employees (MORRIS et al., 2006). Women encounter difficulties to start in business, such as: long working hours, family pressures, conflicts with partners and little access to funding and networks (LITUCHY; REAVLEY, 2004; MATHEW, 2010; WINN, 2005). However, there is little knowledge about aspects associated with the creation of enterprises. Thus, the goal of this research was to understand the reasons and the difficulties encountered by women for the creation of enterprises. In addition, the research searches the relationship between reasons, difficulties and the amount of initial capital, the age of the women, the marital status and the year of business creation. The research was done in Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte. The sample was constituted by 96 women entrepreneurs. The instrument for collecting data was a structured questionnaire. Data analysis was done by means of descriptive statistics, including weighted average, linear correlation and analysis of simple frequencies. Furthermore, we used cluster analysis to identify groups of similar attributes using the Statistica Software 8.0. To investigate the relationship between the difficulties encountered and the initial capital used the linear correlation coefficient the Pearson and for the identification of association with the other variables the test of Fisher was used. Related to the reasons to open the company the research showed three most important: "They wanted to earn a lot of money", "They were not satisfied with the previous work" and "They wanted to earn money". The most important difficulties for the creation of the business were: the lack of experience in the business field and lack of time to participate in networks, difficulty in obtaining start-up capital and lack of family support. The start-up capital was not related to reasons and difficulties to create the businesses. In the same way, the age of entrepreneurs and the year of business creation are not related to the variables reasons and difficulties to starting in business.
Entrepreneurship; Women entrepreneurs; Business creation; Entrepreneur process; Woman entrepreneur
