What women want (and need) from coaching relationships during business incubation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study explores what dimensions of entrepreneurial coaching matter to women during business incubation and why. This issue is important because Canada is a world leader in the rate of entrepreneurial activity and business incubation support, yet women are underrepresented and their coaching needs are not well understood. Purposive sampling was employed to recruit 15 participants (6 women, 5 men, 4 coaches) from four Canadian incubators. Data was collected using semi-structured interviews. NVivo software facilitated coding and gender comparisons. Analysis followed the Gioia methodology for grounded theorizing which revealed 52 second-order concepts that grouped into three primary coaching dimensions (venture support, emotional support, gender inclusivity). Men and women value these dimensions differently. The emergent theoretical model suggests that for women entrepreneurs, business expertise (a dimension of venture support), emotional support, and gender inclusivity influence the development of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), which, in turn, contributes to entrepreneurial outcomes (venture and personal development) during business incubation. The coach’s personal investment and the entrepreneur’s coachability influences these relationships. The findings have implications for future research exploring incubation as a gendered phenomenon, and for incubator managers and policy makers concerned with designing inclusive incubation programs and reducing the gender gap in Canadian entrepreneurship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".