Abstract

The current economic crisis has significantly increased the interest in entrepreneurship. If it was already signaling its central importance in the last decades, sustaining the growth of many economies, in the current context, with stagnation or destruction of salaried employment, it looks as if self-employment is the only solution in the short term. In this context we note that women increasingly have higher incidence and participation in entrepreneurship and, in general, in business development. Specifically in Spain the female employment rate (the percentage of women of working age who are either employees or self-employed) has increased considerably in recent years. Various governmental institutions, both European and Spanish, have established measures to promote female entrepreneurship in recent decades. Furthermore, the academy has also shown a growing interest in this subject, even though there are not too many jobs in this regard. Specifically, several authors have investigated the environmental factors that influence entrepreneurship, but few focus specifically on female entrepreneurship from the psychosocial approach and role theory. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to analyze the personal and social factors that influence the likelihood of women engaging in entrepreneurship, using the Social Action Theory and Roles Theory as theoretical frameworks.