Navigating Entrepreneurial Stress: How Egyptian Female Entrepreneurs Build and Sustain Resilience

Abstract

Women's entrepreneurship in Egypt unfolds amid patriarchal norms, macroeconomic instability, and resource scarcity that generate stress and shape both entry into entrepreneurship and the resilience women develop in response. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with thirteen Egyptian women entrepreneurs across diverse sectors, marital statuses, and socioeconomic positions, this study develops a process model of how stress is converted, through structural coping, into self-actualisation outcomes. Hybrid deductive–inductive thematic analysis integrates the ART of Resilience Framework (Acknowledgment, Reframing, Tailoring) with Self-Competition Theory, which specifies the internally benchmarked logic against which outcomes are evaluated. The analysis identifies five interacting stressors — societal, economic, emotional, identity-rupture, and resource — and shows that resilience operates through building durable coping infrastructure rather than episodic strategy selection. The outcomes participants value most are notably non-financial and relationally embedded: identity, freedom, impact on other women, and confidence. This stress–resilience–outcomes relationship is reciprocal and moderated by marital and child-rearing status and socioeconomic class. The study offers a culturally specific, process-based account of female entrepreneurial resilience and refines both frameworks for MENA contexts.