Engineering with Social Impact: Social Entrepreneurship Led by Women Engineers

Abstract

This study describes the characteristics of social entrepreneurship led by women engineers, considering their motivations, barriers, strategies, and contribution to sustainable development. Using a positivist quantitative approach with a non-experimental cross-sectional descriptive-correlational design, two complementary samples were used: a main sample (n = 240) of women from all engineering programs (cycles V to X) and a complementary sample (n = 110, including 62 women and 48 men) from Industrial Engineering students. Two five-point Likert scale instruments were applied to measure female entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. Results show that the six motivational dimensions present means above 4.19, with the strongest association between innovation and self-efficacy (ρ = .68). The most significant finding is the paradoxical effect of barriers on entrepreneurial intention: women engineers with higher barrier perception show significantly higher entrepreneurial intention (d = 0.70, p < .001), suggesting a resilience mechanism. Gender equity emerges as the only dimension with significant sex differences (d = −0.52). The sociocultural environment constitutes the widest structural gap (1.30). The study demonstrates that the intersection of engineering, gender, and social entrepreneurship constitutes a research object that cannot be reduced to any of its components separately.