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This case study gives an example of a pioneering, specialist home care service for people with dementia living in their own homes in the Borough of Poole in Dorset.

Despite the well-documented importance of empathy and mentoring in entrepreneurship, there is a need for a deeper understanding of how empathy influences individuals’ “willingness to be mentored”.

This paper investigates gender differences in “Willingness to be mentored” based on the mentor’s types of empathy (cognitive vs affective) and entrepreneurship (social vs for-profit). Drawing on the personal identification and the entrepreneurship literature, we measured the respondents’ “Willingness to be mentored” by manipulating the type of empathy and entrepreneurship and comparing its effect between male and female respondents. Primary survey data were collected from master’s degree students in entrepreneurship from diverse business schools. An explanatory qualitative study on female start-uppers complemented the findings.

The results from the quantitative study show that female respondents prefer to be mentored by an entrepreneur who exhibits some affective empathy rather than only cognitive empathy, with a preference for a social entrepreneur. The qualitative study confirms the evidence. This research contributes to the discussion on developing social capabilities to succeed in new ventures. It extends our understanding of the importance of empathic entrepreneurs as mentors to foster entrepreneurship among women.

Theoretically, we demonstrate the existence of a gender difference in “Willingness to be mentored” based on the type of empathy displayed by the entrepreneur. Additionally, we introduce a new construct in the entrepreneurship literature, “Willingness to be mentored”, and differentiate it from “Attitude toward entrepreneurship”.

Black women have traditionally occupied a unique position in the American economic structure – at the very bottom. The year 1920 is a unique historical moment to examine how this came to be. Economic prosperity immediately following World War I, the first wave of Black migration, and accelerating industrialization created occupational opportunities that could have enabled Black women to escape working poverty, as the majority of Black men did, but they were actively constrained. Historical narratives have extensively described Black women’s occupational restriction across regions to dirty work, such as domestic service, but not often in conjunction with a comparison to the expanding opportunities of Black men and White women. While intersectionality studies have honed in on the unique place of Black women, little attention has been devoted to this from a historical vantage point. This chapter examines the role that race, gender, and place played in shaping the experience of working poverty and integrates a consideration of queuing theory and Black population size to examine how variations might shape racial outcomes in the labor market in 1920.