Gender Gap in SME Ownership: An Analysis of Female Entrepreneurship in Santa Elena Canton, Ecuador, Using TreeSoft Sets

Abstract

The paper we present here is an approach to the problem of gender inequality in the artisanal production association called ASOPROMAHER, located in Santa Elena Canton, Ecuador. It is a pretext to address the issue and extrapolate it to the current situation of the entire country. Without a doubt, gender inequality persists in Ecuador today, including an important sphere of economic development in the country such as entrepreneurship in SMEs. There are multiple issues to address in this situation, ranging from psychological, economic, social, cultural, and political issues. Each of these spheres is related to each other in a complex way. In this work, we propose to study the situation regarding female entrepreneurship in ASOPROMAHER. To meet this objective we use the tool known as TreeSoft Set, which allows the representation in the form of trees of relationships among attributes, sub-attributes, sub-sub-attributes, and so on. We propose an algorithm where we use the evaluation of ten experts on the situation of women in this association, as well as analyze other important issues.