of these women (66%) had no previou

of these women (66%) had no previous
experience in business- either
as employees or as owners. This
may account for many of the other
start-up problems faced by these
women.
When asked what their most serious
current problems were, the
most common answer was again,
"cash flow", followed by marketing
and employee management. This,
again, is not very different from
findings from other countries. This
is also reflected in the areas in
which the training, most (43%)
wanted marketing-related training.
Work-family conflicts:
The women entrepreneurs in this
study did not feel that having their
own business affected their roles as
spouse, parent or homemaker very
much. As can be seen from Table 3,
these women experienced very low
levels of work-family conflict in
their spousal or parental roles. For
example, the mean score for the five
variables measuring their relationships
with their partners was 2.3 (a
lower score indicates lower conflict
level); the corresponding figure for
the parental role was again below
the mid-point (2.54). Of the roles
examined (i.e., spouse, parent and
homemaker), the highest level of
conflict was found in the homemaker
role (3.1 out of a 5 point scale). It
should be noted that all these women
had someone to help them with their
household chores- either a part time
or a full time maid. Even with such
help, many of them felt that they had
no time or energy to handle their
household chores.
What could account for the lower
level of role conflict in this sample?
Part of the reason may be the high
amount of spousal support that these
women had. Most of them (over
74%) said that their spouse was either
happy or very happy with the level of
commitment that they had to their
business and over 70% said that their
spouse offered them emotional support.
Thus, even though their partners
did not offer much help with the
household chores or with childrearing,
the women were overall happy
with the level of support that they
received from their marital partners.
This is also reflected in the fact that
five of the women rated spousal support
as a key reason for their success.
Even among the others, many had
stated that a woman cannot hope to
succeed without support from her