Communicating about research results is a key part of all major projects, therefore RE-FEM as well. Data visualization helps to tell stories by presenting complex information in a form easier to understand, focusing on the patterns and outliers.
A good visualization tells a story, removing the noise from data and highlighting useful information!
In this post we highlight three important topics from our Research Report. First, the distribution of respondents by country – women entrepreneurs, second, the use of digital opportunities provided after the pandemic, and last but not least, the perception of readiness to manage future crises.
1. Survey Analysis – Women Entrepreneurs
The survey among women entrepreneurs focused primarily on restarting their businesses and their resilience to manage crises in light of COVID-19. The survey was conducted in 7 countries: Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Spain (in Romania only in Transylvania, and in Spain only in Andalusia).
More than six hundred (608) respondents completed the survey, with the highest number from Finland (138). All the other countries had respondents between 83 and 95 people, with Bulgaria being an exception with only 30 responses. This provides some limitations to the analysis and the interpretation of the results from Bulgaria and should therefore be considered accordingly.
In terms of the age of the respondents, most women entrepreneurs were aged between 41 and 50 years (36%) and 51–60 years (28%), while according to educational attainment, more than half of the sample were highly educated: 33% had a postgraduate degree and 28% had an undergraduate degree.
2. Use of Digital Opportunities Provided After the Pandemic
Regarding digitalisation, the survey’s findings are not surprising. The greater part of the respondents strongly relied on opportunities provided by digitalisation after the pandemic, mostly regarding working with different online tools (50%) and using digital marketing tools (47%), and least for online communication within the company (38%).
Though there are some differences across countries there are no variations that jump out.
3. Managing Future Crisis Situations
Concerning the perception of readiness to manage future crises, nearly 50% of respondents feel somewhat more prepared to manage possible crises, nearly one third feel completely more prepared, while 20% do not feel more prepared after the COVID-19 pandemic.
By country, respondents in Bulgaria expressed the most (50%) that the pandemic has prepared them for handling crises, while respondents from Hungary, Romania and Slovakia were the least confident – as they had the highest share of respondents saying they do not feel more prepared. Nevertheless, this shows that the experience of the pandemic provided many of the respondents with at least some degree of preparedness.
