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Web users' clustering is an important mining task since it contributes in identifying usage patterns, a beneficial task for a wide range of applications that rely on the web. The purpose of this paper is to examine the usage of Kullback‐Leibler (KL) divergence, an information theoretic distance, as an alternative option for measuring distances in web users clustering.

KL‐divergence is compared with other well‐known distance measures and clustering results are evaluated using a criterion function, validity indices, and graphical representations. Furthermore, the impact of noise (i.e. occasional or mistaken page visits) is evaluated, since it is imperative to assess whether a clustering process exhibits tolerance in noisy environments such as the web.

The proposed KL clustering approach is of similar performance when compared with other distance measures under both synthetic and real data workloads. Moreover, imposing extra noise on real data, the approach shows minimum deterioration among most of the other conventional distance measures.

The experimental results show that a probabilistic measure such as KL‐divergence has proven to be quite efficient in noisy environments and thus constitute a good alternative, the web users clustering problem.

This work is inspired by the usage of divergence in clustering of biological data and it is introduced by the authors in the area of web clustering. According to the experimental results presented in this paper, KL‐divergence can be considered as a good alternative for measuring distances in noisy environments such as the web.

This paper aims to explore how gender differences in entrepreneurial intentions (EI) change when entrepreneurship education (EE) is added to the force field of macro-social stimulants and inhibitors of female EI in the particular context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The study is based on a pre-post survey with entrepreneurship students and students with a similar profile enrolled in other courses (N = 246) at three universities. The three main hypotheses are evaluated through independent-samples t-tests and a hierarchical multiple regression analysis.

The findings indicate a negative effect of gender stereotypes on female students’ EI in the UAE, regardless of the course type. Furthermore, entrepreneurship courses appear to be more successful than other courses in raising the EI of students in general and female students in particular. Finally, adding EE to the equation of macro-social inhibitors and stimulants of female EI in the UAE seems to tip the balance in favor of the influence of economic affluence, rapid modernization and proactive governmental policies to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit among female residents. That is, at the end of the entrepreneurship courses, there was no significant gender difference in EI anymore and female students are significantly more likely to experience a positive change in EI than male students.

The literature review identifies the need for future studies to evaluate the impact of variability in sampling and methods among previous studies on gender effects in EE. Building on the findings, future studies could identify which aspects of EE are pivotal for customizing female students’ specific local interests and needs. The study is limited in the sense that the data set did not enable tests of moderators at the course level (which mostly requires more qualitative data) and individual level. In addition, the sample is not representative for all female residents in the UAE at large.

This study might stimulate (UAE) policymakers to increase the scope and quality of EE. In turn, university administrators are recommended to find ways to compensate the self-selection effect (overcome likely opt-out by female students) when entrepreneurship courses are elective.

This exploration was inspired by the strong emphasis that Julie Weeks put on the gendered impact of macro-level factors in business enabling environments (Weeks, 2011). The empirical analysis builds on a conceptual framework that integrates Krueger’s model of EI, theory on gender stereotypes in entrepreneurship and previous literature on the role of EE (reinforcing or mitigating stereotypes). The study is executed in the relatively unexplored context of the UAE, which offers strong macro-social inhibitors for ánd stimulants of female entrepreneurship.