Women home-based business owners: insights from comparative analyses
Karyn Loscocco and Andrea Smith-Hunter

Introduction
Women are becoming entrepreneurs at a more than proportionate rate compared to men (Renzulli et al., 2000). There has been a corresponding interest in studying who these women are, what motivates them to become owners, and what affects their economic success (Clark and James, 1992; Loscocco et al., 1991; Moore and Buttner, 1997; Smith-Hunter, 2000; (Renzulli et al., 2000; Weiling et al., 2001). The woman home-based business owner (HBB), however, remains understudied. There has been more research on women working from home during the past decade (Heck et al., 1992; Waldrop, 1994; Jurik, 1998; Prestniz, 1989), but the bulk of the work in this area has been on homebased employment (Powers, 1995; Dannhauser, 1999; Edwards and Field-Hendrey, 1996; Ahrentzen, 1990; Bailyn, 1989), rather than HBB ownership. Though the work in these areas is a much-needed complement to studies of men small business owners, to our knowledge no study has yet to compare the woman home-based owner to her obvious counterpart, the woman who locates her business outside of the home. We seek to answer a number of questions about women who own and operate businesses from their home by comparing them to women owners whose businesses are run elsewhere. We are motivated by recent statistics showing that the HBB sector in the US is substantial in size and sales. In 1997, HBB represented 52 percent of all firms filing a tax form and produced 10 percent of the receipts of the economy, approximately $325 billion. There are an estimated 11 million of these firms today, up from about 9.2 million in 1997 (Phillips, 2002). In 1996, more than 55,000 HBBs had sales of more than $1 million and employed more than 3.5 million people (Phillips, 2002). The number of HBBs owned by women in the US