Why Are Female-Owned Businesses Smaller? An Empirical Study in Canada and the United States Yves Robichaud Laurentian University Jean-Charles Cachon Laurentian University Egbert McGraw Université de Moncton Female owned businesses tended to be less present in the manufacturing sector and more in the services sector. Female owners were significantly older than their male counterparts and had a longer tenure in their capacity. The smaller size of the female-owned business can be explained by several variables: in terms of entrepreneurial goals, female entrepreneurs put more emphasis on objective related to balancing business and family responsibility and less on extrinsic goals. This research also revealed that male business owners were taking their spouse’s contribution for granted when it came to take care of household responsibilities, whereas female business owners were more often expected to keep their social role within the home, even on top of managing a business. Female business owners were therefore deprived of the supporting role of a spouse and had less time to spend developing their business through strategizing and promoting. This might also shape the network perspective adopted by a higher proportion of female business owners, who need to resort to other expedients in order to maintain their business afloat. It would suggest that for women, networking is not a natural way of doing business, but rather a necessity. INTRODUCTION In the past decades, the number of Female-Owned SMEs increased in most countries. Women are more active than men in the field, when growth rates by number of firms are compared according to gender: the proportion of female business owners has been increasing in countries such as the United States and Brazil (OECD – Entrepreneurship at a Glance, 2013). While results from the 2011 GEM study showed that 12.3% of the workforce (18 to 64 years old) had started or operated a business, which was much higher than what had been observed in 2010 (7.7%), female business start-up rates were increasing: according to the 2013 Global Entrepreneurial Monitor Women’s report, there were eight female business start-ups for ten new male-owned businesses in 2013. Other statistics show that, in the United States, “women are the majority owners in 30% of all privately held firms, are generating $2.5 trillion in revenues and employ 19.1 million individuals” (CWBR, 2005) and that “between 1997 and 2014, when 62 Journal of Management Policy and Practice Vol. 16(1) 2015