A recent study showed that seventy-two percent of Gen Z high school students plan to start their own business one day. It seems the entrepreneurial spirit lives in most of us when we’re young, but as time rolls on, many of us lose our ambition to strike out on our own and settle for being a cog in someone else’s machine. There’s no shame in that, of course. Life is hard and we find the level of engagement that we can live with. We asked employees of all ages, “Do you plan to start your own business in the next five years?”
This information comes thanks to an ongoing study by Comparably. More than 10,000 employees responded to the question.
A third of men and a quarter of women say, yes, they are planning on starting a business over the next half-decade. Men in our society tend to be taught that they can do anything and are encouraged to “dream big,” while women are still emerging from the societal rut they had been placed in. This may explain why entreprenurial spirit seems to be stronger in males at this point. It’s also worth nothing that this question asks whether employees plan to start a business within five years, and its possible that some hopeful entrepreneurs have dreams that are a little farther away.
Nearly half of African-American respondents say they are going to start a business over the next five years. Asian/Pacific Islanders also responded more positively than the overall average. Hispanic/Latinos kept close to the overall male average, and Caucasian results stuck to the female average.
Workers in Design, Business Development (naturally), and the Executive Suite all reported stronger-than-average positive numbers on the question. On the low end were departments like HR, Operations, and Legal – workers who may be so entangled in the daily goings-on of their current job that any speculation about future entrepreneurship may be on hold.
Women in Admin and Communications were the only female respondents by department with more ambition to start their own businesses than their male counterparts. Otherwise, in every department, the male employees are more likely to say that within five years they will be their own boss. The only explanation are deeply ingrained attitudes about the nature of men and women in the workplace.
Perhaps predictably, as our age increases, our ambition to start our own business decreases. As we age, we begin to get a sense of how much time we have, and also of how difficult the world can make it for such entrepreneurial dreams to be realized: few are called, fewer still are chosen. By the mid-50s, sadly, just over 15% of workers still have dreams of hanging out their shingle.
In major coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York, entrepreneurial spirit lives in over one-third of respondents. In freezing Minneapolis and white-hot Phoenix, ambition is less palpable .
Latest reading as of April 6.
