Objectives: The global gender gap in entrepreneurship still persists (Vossenberg, 2013), with more males choosing to be entrepreneurs than females. According to the essentialist theory, this gender difference might be due to the distinctions present in the genetic codes of the two sexes. Inline with the system-justification theory, essentialist beliefs assist in rationalizing sex inequality for submissive or disadvantaged positions (Kay et al., 2007), e.g., the genetic assignment of female is considered to involve weak traits, while male is associated with stronger traits. In this study, we ground our theorization on essentialism (Morton et al., 2009), which makes use of genetic causes to explain human social behavior and aim to enlighten the factor behind low levels of entrepreneurial intentions of females, through this perspective.

Data & Methods: We’ll adopt essentialism and entrepreneurship scales to survey undergraduate students. Our sample is planned to be follow snowball approach among students of foundation universities in Turkey. Turkish entrepreneurs are reported to chose entrepreneurship out of necessity, and the ratio of woman entrepreneurs is still very low (Çetindamar, 2002; Karadeniz, 2006). We aim to comprehend to what extend the essentialism theory is capable of explaining and predicting this motivation.

Results & Conclusions: We are still going through the data analysis phase. Our results will be of importance to scholars and practitioners working on gender equality in entrepreneurship domain.