There is a known fact that prosperity of new ventures will benefit the economy as a wholein a positive manner and therefore the economy should strive to create more new ventures.

Steiner (2007) shows in his article that, one way out of unemployment is to venture intoself-employment. Whilst men venturing into self-employment have been quite stable overthe years, female entrepreneurs have drastically increased. Further, female entrepreneurshipis a way out from poverty, which goes towards equality for a nation (Eftimoski, 2006;Minniti, 2003). There exist an importance to study the in depth factors that correlates withthe female decision making process of venturing into self-employment. The authorsidentified a lack of research focusing on differences in motivation between unemployedwomen and employed women who started their own businesses.

The purpose of this thesis is to find and compare the motivational factors for unemployedand employed women to take the decision of venturing into self-employment. The authorswant to understand the significance of previous studies and developed theories in applianceto previously unemployed and employed females venturing into self-employment withinJonkoping municipality, Sweden. Around this area, there is a great reputation of strongentrepreneurial spirit (Wigren, 2003).

This qualitative study did not aim to generalize the results to a whole population, but ratherto understand the researched individual’s choices when taking the step into self-employment.Since this thesis wishes to find out incentives and motivations for thedecision of females going into self-employment, in-depth interviews with 10 self-employedwomen has been conducted to deeper the understanding of these events. A multiple casestudy was used in order to find common motivational factors for women to enter self-employment.

The main results of this thesis showed that there were differences in motivational factorsfor unemployed and employed women when deciding to become self-employed. The mostvisible motivational factor for the unemployed females to enter self-employment was theactual unemployment. However for the employed women, the biggest motivational factorswere disagreement with management and not being able to develop, in combination with abusiness opportunity. There were also no signs of monetary reward, impacting upon thefemale’s decision to venture into self-employment.