Female entrepreneurs' different priorities.

Personal growth and self-determination -- not attaining great wealth and building large operations -- ranked high as motivating factors among women who have started their own businesses, according to Holly Buttner, a business faculty member at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who has spent four years in a study of female entrepreneurs. "Getting rich and owning a large company were not the major reasons these women started their own businesses; in fact, they didn't rank high as reasons. Profits were important, not so much as income, but as a means to ensure that the businesses they started would survive."

Buttner and Dorothy Moore, a business professor at The Citadel, Charleston, S.C., studied 129 women (120 white and nine African-American) who had opened their own businesses in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans, Boston, Cincinnati, and Winston-Salem, N.C. The attitudes of the women they interviewed differ significantly from traditional measures of success. "My sense is that it was more than a money thing for most of the women who went into business for themselves," Buttner indicates. "It was a search for defining who they were and an opportunity to actualize their personal values in their work. Some of the women said if they had clients whose values differed significantly from theirs, they wouldn't work with them a...