Perceptions of Entrepreneurship Among Graduate Students: Challenges,

Opportunities, and Cultural Biases

Manuela Andreea Petrescu

and Dan Mircea Suciu

Babes¸-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Keywords:

Entrepreneurial Skills, Entrepreneurship Challenges, e-Learning, Online Teaching, Empirical Study, Gender

Discrimination, Cultural Biases, Computer Science, IT.

Abstract:

The purpose of the paper is to examine the perceptions of entrepreneurship of graduate students enrolled in

a digital-oriented entrepreneurship course, focusing on the challenges and opportunities related to starting a

business. In today’s digital era, businesses heavily depend on tailored software solutions to facilitate their

operational processes, foster expansion, and enhance their competitive edge, thus assuming, to a certain de-

gree, the characteristics of software companies. For data gathering, we used online exploratory surveys. The

ﬁndings indicated that although entrepreneurship was considered an attractive option by students, very few of

them declared that they intended to start a business soon. The main issues raised by the students were internal

traits and external obstacles, such as lack of resources and support. Gender discrimination and cultural biases

persist, limiting opportunities and equality for women. In terms of gender, women face limited representation

in leadership roles, are expected to do more unpaid ’family work’, are perceived as less capable in ding busi-

ness, and need to prove their skills. Even if women are less discriminated now, both genders agree that women

still face discrimination in business domain. In terms of percentages, women mentioned gender discrimination

in higher percentages. Addressing these issues requires awareness, education, and policy changes to ensure

fair treatment and opportunities for women.

1 INTRODUCTION

Entrepreneurship is a signiﬁcant contributor to eco-

nomic growth, prompting a call for increased educa-

tion in this ﬁeld among students, teachers, and em-

ployees (Klofsten et al., 2019). For this reason, en-

trepreneurial courses were included in the curricula

of many universities and colleges. Various educa-

tional workshops and programs were created to ex-

pose people to these concepts. European Union has

also responded to this growing demand with its En-

trepreneurship 2020 Action Plan

, which aims to fos-

ter the exchange of best practices in entrepreneurial

education.

The emphasis on entrepreneurial-centered educa-

tional initiatives appears to have yielded positive re-

sults, as evidenced by the upward trend in the num-

ber of new businesses established in Europe in recent

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9537-1466X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5958-419X

https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/

supporting-entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship-education/

commissions-actions-entrepreneurship-education\ en

years, up to 2023 (Statista, 2022). However, accord-

ing to McDowell (William et al., 2019), entrepreneurs

experience a trade-off between dedicating themselves

to their own business, which may improve their job

satisfaction, and the negative consequences of emo-

tional exhaustion, which tend to outweigh this beneﬁt.

Alternatively, (Padovez-Cualheta et al., 2019) found

that entrepreneurs report higher levels of family satis-

faction. In the contemporary era characterized by dig-

ital advances, a wide range of businesses rely heavily

on software and digital tactics to ﬂourish and engage

in competitive endeavors. It can be argued that ev-

ery entrepreneurial enterprise that embraces innova-

tion can be categorized, to some extent, as a software

company (Chandra et al., 2022).

Small companies are more innovative; they strug-

gle and can adapt more easily (Tor, 2017), so it is es-

sential to stimulate their development In this context,

our objective is to assess the intention of postgradu-

ate students enrolled in an entrepreneurial course at

Babes-Bolyai University to start a business, the chal-

lenges they perceive in this particular domain, and

cultural biases. This study has the potential to ob-

Petrescu, M. and Suciu, D.

Perceptions of Entrepreneurship Among Graduate Students: Challenges, Opportunities, and Cultural Biases.

DOI: 10.5220/0012606000003693

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2024) - Volume 1, pages 347-354

ISBN: 978-989-758-697-2; ISSN: 2184-5026

347

tain accurate results because it was organized at the

university level, so the enrolled students were from

22 faculties within the university, different specializa-

tions and different cities in the country.

The present study has been conducted with two

speciﬁc objectives in mind. The ﬁrst objective is to

ﬁnd out if there is a correlation between students’ per-

ception related to the importance of entrepreneurship

and how it affects the decision to start their own busi-

ness. The second objective is to understand the main

factors that discourage recent college graduates from

pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. We took into ac-

count and analyzed the responses received from stu-

dents using a survey related to opportunities and chal-

lenges in entrepreneurship.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 cov-

ers related work, and in Section 3 we provide a thor-

ough explanation of the environment in which we did

the researchSpeciﬁcally, Section 4 outlines the data

collection process and the analysis of our research

questions. We have also taken measures to address

potential threats to the validity of our study, as out-

lined in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 contains the

conclusions and some thoughts on future work.

2 RELATED WORK

Entrepreneurial pursuits represent a signiﬁcant part of

the specialized literature. One of the primary areas

of focus in research refers to the signiﬁcant obsta-

cles that young people face when embarking on en-

trepreneurial endeavors. It also assesses the effects of

entrepreneurial education in addressing obstacles.

Teaching entrepreneurial skills to students begins

with teaching entrepreneurial skills to teachers. The

importance of improving teachers’ competencies in

academic technology (not only in business schools

but also in engineering programs) and broadening

their pedagogical strategies to incorporate novel and

innovative methods for teaching entrepreneurship is

emphasized in (Kuratko, 2005). (Pittaway and Cope,

2007) used a systematic literature review (SLR) to ex-

amine several themes in the education of future en-

trepreneurs. The authors arrive at the conclusion that

there exists a lack of clarity regarding the deﬁnition

of ’entrepreneurship education’ and the speciﬁc out-

comes that are intended to be achieved through its

promotion. Furthermore, it has been recommended

that improving the evidence base can be achieved

through increased investment in the examination of

entrepreneurial education, with the aim of assessing

the effectiveness of interventions.

Multiple studies, including the aforementioned

references and additional sources ((Neck and Greene,

2011), (Ratten and Usmanij, 2021), (Boldureanu

et al., 2020)), agree that entrepreneurial education is

of considerable signiﬁcance and has the capacity to

inﬂuence individuals’ mindsets.

The context-dependent and gender-aware imped-

iments for female entrepreneurship are discussed in

(Espinoza Trujano and Welter, 2020) and their impact

in the digital era in (Ughetto, 2020).

Most papers show that entrepreneurial education

is well recognized and needs more research to fully

understand its impacts on gender biases. This study

empirically examines entrepreneurial perspectives in

the context of digital transformation.

3 OVERVIEW AND STRUCTURE

OF THE STUDY

Our investigation considered the feedback provided

by students who were registered in the elective

digital-oriented online course ”Fundamentals of En-

trepreneurship”, at Babes-Bolyai University through a

concluding survey. This section provides an overview

of the course and the demographic of the students.

3.1 Course Overview

”Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship” is a cross-

disciplinary program accessible to all master’s stu-

dents of Babes-Bolyai University, Romania. The

course is elective, contains 14 lectures of two hours

long, and is open to students from 22 faculties.

The course was developed with the underlying

premise that there is a signiﬁcant correlation between

entrepreneurship, innovation, and software develop-

ment, which is primarily inﬂuenced by market dy-

namics, scalability, cost effectiveness, and the trans-

formative capabilities of digital technologies. We be-

lieve that software is an essential enabler of innova-

tion, efﬁciency, and competitiveness. Some compa-

nies are heavily dependent on software, even if they

are not classic software companies. Thus, even in

non-software businesses, software helps innovate and

achieve goals. All of these ideas were considered

during the selection process for topics and speaker

choices for all course lectures.

The ”Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship” course

provides students with the opportunity to acquire

foundational knowledge in the ﬁeld of entrepreneur-

ship. This includes instruction on essential skills

such as developing business plans, evaluating so-

lutions and understanding the needs of future con-

sumers and competitors. Moreover, numerous topics

CSEDU 2024 - 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

348

encompass multidisciplinary elements wherever in-

formation technology (IT) assumes a substantial role.

Consequently, lecturers frequently discuss topics re-

lated to digital transformation and digitization. In ad-

dition, the course covered aspects related to learning

various software tools, including their optimization

and how to create a business plan using them. Each

lecture was taught by a specialist in a speciﬁc ﬁeld.

The speakers were university colleagues or distinctive

individuals from the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The lectures have a strong emphasis on practical and

digitization aspects.

The distinctive character of the course can be

attributed to several factors: participant’s diversity,

teaching method, and speaker’s selection. Teaching

students from different master programs needs ﬂexi-

ble methods to suit varying origins, knowledge lev-

els, interests, and views, enabling cross-disciplinary

integration. Due to the geographical distribution of

the students, we opted for an online course and online

access to course materials, video recordings, evalua-

tions, and announcements. While the course faced or-

ganizational challenges due to its diverse participant

base, it capitalized on diverse expertise, geographi-

cal distribution, and industry insights to create a dy-

namic and enriching learning environment for tech-

nology entrepreneurship students.

At the beginning of the course, we collected infor-

mation on students’ perceptions of gender discrimi-

nation and cultural biases. Furthermore, after each

lecture, we requested feedback to assess the level of

student engagement, their comprehension of the ma-

terial covered, and their general attitude and percep-

tion toward the course and the information presented.

The authors’ research on course organization prob-

lems and student evaluation of course content and

structure was published in (Petrescu et al., 2022).

3.2 Participants Demographics

As indicated in the preceding section, the students

who participated in the course were registered in dif-

ferent faculties located in various locations (urban

areas) where the university had established learning

centers. As participation in the course was optional,

the course was announced on the faculties’ pages,

and we did not inﬂuence the enrolled students’ selec-

tion process. A total of 401 students enrolled in the

master’s entrepreneurship course. The subset of stu-

dents that ﬁnally joined the course formed our survey-

participant set. A group of students experienced chal-

lenges with time availability, which resulted in their

withdrawal from the course at the beginning.

4 DATA COLLECTION AND

ANALYSIS

The main objective of our study was to conduct a

qualitative investigation into the student’s perceptions

regarding the challenges and opportunities related to

starting a business venture, as well as their inclination

toward initiating a new company. We projected the

goal into two research questions:

RQ1. What are the main factors that discourage re-

cent college graduates from pursuing entrepreneurial

endeavors? The primary objective is to identify

potential modiﬁcations to the content of the Fun-

damentals of Entrepreneurship course that would

effectively cater to the critical requirements of young

learners. Consequently, we have conducted an

analysis of the factors that serve as disincentives for

individuals to pursue private entrepreneurship.

RQ2. Which are the cultural biases that inﬂuence

entrepreneurial activity? Subsequently, an examina-

tion was conducted on how students place themselves

with respect to cultural biases and discrimination as

a whole and the degree of signiﬁcance they attribute

to entrepreneurship within a broader economic frame-

work. This positioning can provide us with valuable

information on the importance of this issue for ado-

lescent learners and their desire to pursue this path.

We collected the responses using an online sur-

vey. The survey remained open for two weeks to

allow everyone to respond despite a busy schedule.

In this study, we used quantitative methods; speciﬁc

questionnaire surveys according to the speciﬁcation

of empirical community standards (Ralph, 2021) and

thematic analysis (Braun et al., 2019) to evaluate the

responses to open questions. Questionnaire surveys

and thematic analysis were used in other studies re-

lated to computer science (Redmond et al., 2013; Pe-

trescu and Sterca, 2022; Motogna et al., 2021).

To comply with the ACM standards (Ralph,

2021), we worked in parallel using the following pro-

cedure: collecting the data, performing a brief analy-

sis of the responses, reallocating the answers to other

questions (if they were better ﬁtted), determining spe-

ciﬁc keywords, and grouping them into classes. The

classiﬁcation was veriﬁed by the other author, who

also made some observations. Both authors ana-

lyzed the observations together, decided if and what

changes were necessary, and performed them.

Some answers contained exactly one keyword,

other answers contained more keywords, and there

were questions for which we did not have any an-

swers. When we analyzed the results, we decided to

Perceptions of Entrepreneurship Among Graduate Students: Challenges, Opportunities, and Cultural Biases

349

use the prevalence appearance of the keywords com-

pared to the total number of answers; therefore, the

results obtained are expressed in percentages, but the

sum of all percentages was not 100% (because the an-

swers contained more than one keyword). The ques-

tions asked in the survey can be visualized in Table 1.

Closed-ended questions, such as those about gender,

were used to categorize the participants and facilitate

the formulation of conclusions.

Table 1: Survey Questions.

Q1 What faculty are you from?

Q2 How do you identify yourself? (man, woman, other)

Q3 What are in your opinion the major challenges when

starting a business?

Q4 Do you want to start a business? (yes / no)

Q5 If you want to start a business, when do you plan to start

it?

Q6 Is entrepreneurship an attractive option for young peo-

ple? (open question)

Q7 Do you believe that women face discrimination in en-

trepreneurship? (open question)

Q8 Do you believe that men face discrimination in en-

trepreneurship? (open question)

4.1 RQ1: What Are the Main Factors

that Discourage Recent College

Graduates from Pursuing

Entrepreneurial Endeavors?

To ﬁnd the response to this question, we asked stu-

dents at the beginning of the course what they con-

sidered to be the major issues and challenges that

could appear when starting a business. From a

psychological perspective, people may ﬁnd it eas-

ier to achieve emotional detachment, allowing for

a clearer analysis of the challenges faced by young

entrepreneurs. A portion of the student population,

speciﬁcally 14.66%, opted to abstain from respond-

ing to this inquiry. However, other students provided

a diverse range of examples that have the potential to

inﬂuence and dissuade recent college graduates from

embarking on entrepreneurial pursuits.

4.1.1 General Overview

The identiﬁed challenges can be grouped as external

challenges (context, laws, other people’s inﬂuence),

and challenges that are tightly related to each per-

son’s skills and methods of solving a problem. The

most mentioned challenge was an external one, the

ﬁght with general perception 25.67%(men are better

compared to women or young people can not create a

business). This challenge is related to the second most

mentioned one: Lack of respect/authority mentioned

by 9.45%, as the third: Lack of credibility scores half

of the second. According to the responses received,

women also face challenges in terms of credibility due

to gender biases. Unfair stereotypes can undermine

their expertise and decision-making skills, impacting

career opportunities and personal interactions.

Fluctuating income also scores high on perceived

challenges. Irregular earnings can lead to ﬁnancial in-

stability, making it challenging to cover essential ex-

penses consistently. Planning for ﬂuctuating income

often involves budgeting, building savings, and estab-

lishing a ﬁnancial safety net to mitigate the poten-

tial risks associated with income variability. Other

external challenges mentioned by students are ”Fear

of failure” or ”having too high expectations”, ”Time

constraints”, ”Family constraints” (family work, in-

cluding care of children).

The students expressed challenges related to the

skills of each person: Overconﬁdence, Impulsiveness,

Lack of commitment, Perfectionism or Lack of orga-

nization. In the students’ responses, we could ﬁnd

one or more keywords from both types of challenges:

”Barriers like conﬁdence”, ”Not taken seriously”,

”Gender discrimination, prejudice, sacriﬁces made in

the family”, ”lack of time, perfectionism, responsibil-

ity for the family, fear of failure”.

We classiﬁed the challenges into three main cate-

gories, the ﬁrst one involves external challenges, the

second one includes the skills and characteristics of

each person. The last category is related to the generic

business environment as mentioned in Table 2.

Table 2: Entrepreneurial challenges classiﬁcation.

External

challenges

General Perception (Cultural Biases), Gen-

der Discrimination, Lack of respect and au-

thority, Time constraints, Lack of credibility,

Family work

Personal

challenges

Overconﬁdence, Impulsiveness, Fear of fail-

ure and too high expectations, Lack of skills,

Lack of organization, Perfectionism, Lack of

commitment

Other Fluctuating income, Financial issues, Market

competition

Challenges related to economic skills, marketing,

manufacturing, ﬁnancial knowledge, and lack of re-

sources (human/other types of resources) have an in-

signiﬁcant prevalence in received answers. We found

the reason for this when we checked the answers

related to the student’s previous experience in en-

trepreneurship - most of them do not have any expe-

rience, or they have experience only in a speciﬁc area

(such as sales). As we collected data at the beginning

of the course, our students did not know or perceive

these challenges as such. In subsidiaries, it reﬂects the

lack of entrepreneurial knowledge and the importance

CSEDU 2024 - 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

350

of teaching entrepreneurship.

In conclusion, the main challenges mentioned by

the students refer to external factors, to cultural bi-

ases, when the role of women in the family is primar-

ily related to the raising of children. Subsidiary, they

also mention challenges that are personal characteris-

tics: impulsiveness, capacity to make fast decisions,

perfectionism, or lack of organization.

4.2 RQ2: Which Are the Cultural

Biases that Inﬂuence

Entrepreneurial Activity?

Since companies owned by women are underrepre-

sented, we were interested in the cultural biases re-

lated to gender discrimination. As innovation is

driven by young people, we analyzed cultural biases

related to young people in entrepreneurship.

4.3 Gender Discrimination

According to INSSE, in Romania, only 26% of the IT

companies were started by women. Taking into ac-

count that the number of women in Romania is 5%

larger than the number of men

, we can conclude that

women are underrepresented. Therefore, it is impor-

tant to understand the reasons behind this disparity.

Knowing the reasons, universities and other institu-

tions could take action to improve the percentage of

women in the IT entrepreneurship sector.

When we analyzed the responses, we realized

that our participants (regardless of their stated gen-

der) have the same beliefs about young people be-

ing perceived as less capable compared to a more

mature generation. However, in terms of perception

of women versus men’s capabilities, the ideas are a

little more nuanced: women still struggle with the

general perception: ”traditionally, she takes care of

the house, family and does not do business”. An-

other answer stated the general perception as a chal-

lenge for women without offering context or explana-

tions: ” I would say they (’men’) are less negatively

discriminated compared to women”. Both genders

seem preoccupied with work/life balance and men-

tion the same issues, one man wrote: ”Balance fam-

ily and business responsibilities”, other woman spec-

iﬁed: ”Gender discrimination, prejudice, sacriﬁces

made in the family”.

The perception of discrimination in entrepreneur-

ship differs by gender as a percentage, although both

genders perceive that there is gender-based discrim-

https://insse.ro/cms/demography-in-europe/bloc-1b.

html?lang=en

ination. In addition, there is a collective perception

in the responses received according to which women

are perceived to be less capable than men and have

more challenges related to family care, since they are

the main caregivers. Women often face unique chal-

lenges related to time management and involvement

due to societal expectations.

Men and women (as genders) are perceived to

have different sets of skills that would help them in

a speciﬁc situation. Men are seen to be more com-

petitive and willing to take risks compared to women:

”Sometimes men risk too much” and women are seen

to have less credibility: ”Women may have less credi-

bility”. There was a small percentage of women, less

than 10%, and less than 5% of men who considered

women not discriminated against. Men seemed to be

more straightforward: ”They are not”, ”I don’t think

they (women) are discriminated”, even if we got some

answers that have more details: ”I don’t believe there

are disadvantages based on gender or that women

are discriminated; If you are capable and determined,

gender doesn’t matter.”.

Based on the answers, we could determine a per-

ception of skills that deﬁnes genders, ”women are

more rigorous” or ”men are more capable”, but to

determine a pattern, we need a larger number of re-

sponses and we need responses to questions related to

perception of gender-speciﬁc skills. These comments

appeared in the answers to questions related to gender

discrimination; therefore, we consider that we cannot

provide statistics on gender-perceived skills.

The percentages of responses considering that

women are discriminated are much higher: around

25% of women and around double for men, as can

be seen in Figure 1. Visualizing, in terms of discrimi-

nation, men and women state that women are discrim-

inated in entrepreneurship according to their gender,

the percentages are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Are women discriminated in entrepreneurship?

However, their open questions reﬂect a cultural

bias, as women are perceived to be less capable com-

pared to men. When asked if women are discrimi-

Perceptions of Entrepreneurship Among Graduate Students: Challenges, Opportunities, and Cultural Biases

351

nated, the responses reﬂected two positions: assumed

positions by women: ”lately, I think not”, ”I be-

lieve that in our country women are discriminated”

and by men: ”Yes, until they manage to prove their

skills. They start their journey with this minor hand-

icap”. Sometimes, the students’ responses reﬂect

the general perception of society: ”Because of the

general perception, men are perceived as more ca-

pable/resourceful in general”, ”The mentality is that

men are the ones who lead” or ”women are not taken

seriously”, ”misoginism”. In terms of discrimination,

both genders consider that men are less discriminated

based on their gender in entrepreneurship, the per-

centages are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Are men discriminated in entrepreneurship?

Some comments stated that general perceptions

and cultural biases are changing: ”Unfortunately,

sometimes yes, but they (women) are less and less

discriminated against, and the world is progressing

in favor of equality”. Awareness campaigns and edu-

cation have empowered individuals to challenge gen-

der biases. While progress has been made, challenges

remain, such as the gender gap and underrepresenta-

tion in certain ﬁelds such as computer science or en-

trepreneurship.

In conclusion, even if there are opinions that state

there are no major challenges related to gender: ”I

don’t think there are gender disadvantages, if you are

capable and determined, it doesn’t matter gender”,

the main perception (over 63% of the answers) men-

tions that women have more challenges compared to

men when we talk about starting and running a busi-

ness. According to our data, even if both genders

state that women are discriminated, women perceive

gender discrimination much more compared to men,

more than 25% of women considered to be discrimi-

nated versus less than 10% men.

4.4 Age Inﬂuence

To ﬁnd the answer to this research question, we an-

alyzed the responses received to the following ques-

tions and correlated the answers:

• Do you consider entrepreneurship to be an attrac-

tive option?

• Do you intend to start a business?

• When do you plan to start a business?

The large majority of the students (36.00%) found en-

trepreneurship very attractive, 34.67% found it attrac-

tive, and 6.67% of the students did not answer this

question.

To establish a correlation between the questions,

we took into account the distinction between the en-

ticement of entrepreneurship and the inclination to

initiate a business venture. Even if entrepreneurship

scores high in attractiveness, in our study we found

that their intention to start a business is much lower;

45.33% stated their interest in opening a business,

44.00% mentioned that they do not want to start a

business, and 10.67% did not answer this question.

Thus, there is a 20% difference between the stated

domain attractiveness and their intentions to start a

business. The survey was completed at the beginning

of the course, so students lack awareness of potential

challenges in various business-related domains, such

as ﬁnancial and competition-related issues, market-

ing, or developing a product. These challenges will be

discovered throughout the course and can have an im-

pact on the percentages. The attractiveness percent-

ages are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Is entrepreneurship an attractive option?

We used a ﬁve-point scale to assess the desire of

students to start a business within a designated time-

frame. We considered that the ﬁrst two options, as

soon as possible and in the near future are the best

predictors of their intentions to start a business. The

question was optional, so we considered that the stu-

dents who did not answer this question do not have

speciﬁc plans and, most probably, do not have any in-

tentions to start a business soon. When asked in detail

to conﬁrm their intention to start a business, a large

part of the students stated that they intend to start a

business after 5 or more years. Approximately 20%

CSEDU 2024 - 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

352

of the students did not answer this question; we inter-

preted that the lack of response was due to the fact that

these students probably do not want to start a business

at all. The percentages are detailed in Figure 4.

Figure 4: When do the students plan to start a business?

There were answers reﬂecting a possible reason

why students do not want to start a business: cultural

bias and perception that consider young people are

discriminated: ”yes, if the person is young”.

In conclusion, students consider entrepreneurship

to be an attractive option for young people even if

they need to confront some cultural biases, and only

22.66% stated that they intend to start a business soon

or in the near future.

5 MITIGATION ACTIONS TO

OVERCOME CHALLENGES

Depending on the prevalence and type, for each chal-

lenge, there should be a different mitigation action.

Some challenges such as legal constraints or changes

in the ﬁnancial environment can be mitigated only by

learning: Students should realize that there is no per-

fect /stated solution and that they must adapt depend-

ing on the new conditions.

Regarding internal challenges, students face var-

ious challenges in their personal skills that can hold

them back from reaching their full potential. These

challenges come in different forms, such as commu-

nication difﬁculties, time management problems, lack

of self-conﬁdence, personal traits (embracing risks

more easily), or difﬁculty in handling stress. How-

ever, with self-awareness and acceptance and a will-

ingness to change and adapt, it is possible to over-

come these challenges and develop into more capable

and resilient individuals. As these challenges are spe-

ciﬁc to each individual, only a generic approach can

be discussed in a course.

The external challenges can be grouped into two

major types: those that apply to both genders and

those that apply mainly to a speciﬁc gender. By culti-

vating a mindset of perpetual education, students can

effectively mitigate various challenges (market un-

derstanding, risk management, lack of ﬁnancial lit-

eracy).Other challenges (such as team building and

leadership) require hands-on actions that can be ob-

tained by working in the domain for other companies

or starting a business.

Gender biases have long been an issue in society

and impact various aspects of life, including the work-

place. These biases perpetuate stereotypes and hinder

women’s progress. By raising awareness, fostering

empathy, and promoting inclusivity, individuals can

create a more equitable and supportive environment.

Having more women in this domain, the general per-

ception will change as people adapt to new realities.

6 THREATS TO VALIDITY

When we developed this study, we considered the

guidelines and recommendations for survey research

detailed in (Ralph, 2021), and we considered that we

must address the following threats to validity: the set

of participants (target population and participant se-

lection), contingency actions for dropouts, author’s

subjective approach, and research ethics.

Participant Set. The survey was sent to all stu-

dents enrolled in the entrepreneurship course. We did

not select any participants; survey-related information

was sent to all students enrolled in the course. Partic-

ipation in the study was optional and was each stu-

dent’s personal decision. Due to this approach, there

was no threat related to the target population and par-

ticipant selection.

Dropout Rates. We tried to mitigate this threat by

sending only one online survey, by limiting the num-

ber of questions and keeping it open for two weeks.

Regarding the research ethics, we did not enforce

participation (this can be conﬁrmed by the participa-

tion rates) and we let everyone know about the anony-

mous character of the survey. We did not put any re-

strictions on answering all the questions, as the ques-

tions were optional. Because of this approach, we

eliminated biases related to compulsory behavior and

ensured that we got relevant data. We also informed

the students about the purpose of collecting these data

and how we will use the data collected.

When humans intervene in a process, there is al-

ways the issue of a subjective approach that inﬂu-

ences the results. We tried to mitigate this risk by fol-

lowing the guidelines and procedures recommended

and used by the computer science community for this

type of research and for text interpretation.

Perceptions of Entrepreneurship Among Graduate Students: Challenges, Opportunities, and Cultural Biases

353

7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

We examined potential challenges to launching a

business and opportunities by examining the atti-

tudes and opinions of graduated students about en-

trepreneurship. Few students express a desire to pur-

sue entrepreneurship in the near future, despite the

fact that most ﬁnd it an attractive alternative. The

results emphasize the need for entrepreneurial educa-

tion to provide a more thorough understanding of the

skills and knowledge necessary to successfully estab-

lish and operate a business. The study also shows that

personal and external traits (such as lack of capital

and support) can pose serious obstacles.

Gender discrimination and cultural biases persist,

limiting opportunities and equality for women. In

terms of gender, women appear to have more chal-

lenges compared to men, women face limited repre-

sentation in leadership roles, and are expected to do

more unpaid ”family work”, taking care of children

and family. They have to face the stereotypes of soci-

ety, are seen as less capable, and need to prove their

skills, to prove that the general mentality is wrong

and that not only men are leaders. In terms of per-

centages, women mentioned gender discrimination in

higher percentages. Addressing these issues requires

awareness, education, and policy changes to ensure

fair treatment and opportunities for women.

To enhance and motivate students to engage in en-

trepreneurial endeavors, it is imperative that future re-

search investigates pragmatic solutions to these chal-

lenges, as well as techniques aimed at improving en-

trepreneurial education and mitigating gender preju-

dice. The ﬁght against gender discrimination is far

from over, but there is a positive shift toward a more

equitable and inclusive world where individuals are

judged based on their abilities rather than their gen-

der. This inclusive world can become a reality with

the help of education and policies that promote equal

respect and authority for women.

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