Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the role of culture in women entrepreneurship

• 2. Evaluate the negative impact of gender stereotypes

• 3. Understand how women entrepreneurs utilize social and psychological capital

• 4. To understand the importance of business networks for women entrepreneurs

Opening Profile: Time Warner Cable

Time Warner Cable reported a huge quarterly loss of television subscribers, the largest in its history: 306,000 of its 11.7 million subscribers had dropped the company, the New York Times reports. An impasse with television networks CBS over fees led to Time Warner blacking CBS out of millions of homes in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas for a month during the summer of 2013.

The parties’ ultimate agreement was viewed as a victory for CBS, which won a promise of significantly higher fees for its programming in the blacked-out cities, from about $1 per subscriber to $2, as well as the digital rights to sell its content to web-based distributors such as Netflix. Time Warner halted the blackout and conceded in large part because it feared a mass exodus of subscribers if the dispute interrupted the start of Monday night football on CBS.

Time Warner’s disappointing news highlights why attempts to punish a negotiation counterpart into conceding often backfire. Time Warner’s focus on the pain it was inflicting on CBS blinded it to the likelihood that it would suffer from the blackout at least as much. Rather than spurring agreement, such hardball tactics tend to escalate disputes and drive parties even farther apart.

Don’t Take Things for Granted; It Will Cost You

Women are generally perceived to have lower power than men. The statement finds support from data provided by UN women, 2018. The data suggests that millions of primary school-aged girls are not able to attend primary schools. The same is not true for primary school-aged boys. UN women also highlight that there is a global gender pay gap of about 23 percent and women are also more likely to experience physical and sexual violence from their partners. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was estimated that 60 percent of the world’s poor were females of a variety of ages (UNIDO, 2001).